Mark Elliott and Kirsty Hughes (eds), Common Law Constitutional Rights

DOI10.3366/elr.2022.0749
Author
Pages137-138
Date01 January 2022
Published date01 January 2022

It was kind of Lord Reed to provide such a warm foreword to this collection of essays, given it seems at times to be almost precision-engineered to rebut one of the most consistent themes within his jurisprudence. Common law constitutional rights have been in vogue for the last half a decade or so due in no small part to Lord Reed's work in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has repeatedly, in decisions including Osborn v Parole Board[2014] AC 1115, Kennedy v Charity Commission[2015] AC 455 and R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor[2020] AC 869, emphasised that litigants need not and should not found their claims solely on the ECHR and Human Rights Act 1998. On the contrary, the Supreme Court has argued that domestic constitutional rights often provide the same, if not greater (and more contextualised protection) than the Convention. Such an approach has at times thrown up surprising results; few would have anticipated that a common law right to worship was enforceable in the courts until Lord Braid's recent decision in Philip v Scottish Ministers 2020 SLT 559.

This collection of essays, edited by Mark Elliott and Kirsty Hughes, puts a significant dampener on the high-minded rhetoric of the courts in this area. Broadly speaking the book's essays develop two key problems with a jurisprudence based on common law constitutional rights: (1) common law rights do not, as a rule, provide the same breadth or depth of protection as those enshrined within the Human Rights Act; and (2) the entire concept of common law constitutional rights is under-conceptualised. The first half of...

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