Alison L Young, PARLIAMENTARY SOVEREIGNTY AND THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT Oxford: Hart Publishing (www.hartpub.co.uk), 2009. xvi + 180 pp. ISBN 9781841138305. £45.
| Pages | 154-157 |
| DOI | 10.3366/E1364980909001097 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Author | Adam Tomkins |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
Alison Young's short but densely argued book on the sovereignty of Parliament and the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) contains analysis of two main issues. The first is whether strong judicial protection of human rights in the United Kingdom can be squared with its ongoing commitment to “continuing” parliamentary sovereignty (that is to say, to the notion of the sovereignty of Parliament that posits that
Although the book is not formally divided into two parts, each of the main issues on which the book focuses is taken in turn, with chapters 1-3 being principally concerned with questions of continuing parliamentary sovereignty and chapters 4-6 being principally concerned with matters of rights, democracy and democratic dialogue. Young's style in each of the two parts is rather different. The opening chapters bring the reader directly in at the deep end – there is no gentle introduction here – tackling immediately some of the thornier and more technical problems associated with advanced scholarship on the sovereignty of Parliament, such as “manner and form”, the problem of “Henry VIII” clauses, implied repeal, and the alleged category of “constitutional statutes”. As such, these chapters will be most readily accessible only to readers already familiar with the law and with the secondary literature on the sovereignty of Parliament. While the argument is for the most part expert, there are some curious omissions. Particularly striking in this regard is the discussion of constitutional statutes, which features the first...
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