Supremacy and hegemony: a reply to Palmer and Martin
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12281 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| Author | JAMES ALLAN,DAVID CAMPBELL |
DOI: ./j ols.
ARTICLE
Supremacy and hegemony: a reply to Palmer
and Martin
JAMES ALLAN1DAVID CAMPBELL2
TC Bierne School of Law, The University
of Queensland, Forgan Smith Building,
St Lucia Campus, Brisbane, QLD ,
Australia
Lancaster University Law School,
Lancaster University, Lancaster,
LA YN, England
Correspondingauthor
DavidCampbell, Lancaster University Law
School,Lancaster University, Lancaster,
LAYN, England
Email:d.campbell@lancaster.ac.uk
Abstract
In a article in this journal, which drew on previ-
ous work, we argued by examination of a number of
extremely important cases that the senior judiciary is in
the process of attempting to create judicial supremacy
in the UK. It is doing so, not by democratic debate,
but by legal procedural innovation incomprehensible
to the electorate. Invited by the journal to reply to a
criticism of our argument by Dr Stephanie Palmer and
Dr Stevie Martin, we have sought to defend our account
of the undemocratic procedural novelty of those cases.
Though we are grateful to Dr Stephanie Palmer and Dr Stevie Martin for taking the trouble to
criticize our claim that the senior judiciary is successfully, because surreptitiously, attempting to
create judicial supremacy in the United Kingdom (UK), it is not easy to reply productively to that
criticism. This is because it largely restates the position that we ourselves found objectionable, and
then simply proclaims that it is not objectionable after all. How does one respond to criticism that
does not engage with one’s argument but instead tells one that one’s scholarship so lacks fairness
and accuracy that it cannot properly understand the position that it finds objectionable, which
indeed is why that position is found objectionable? Perhaps it is best to just let the readers of this
journal look at the arguments as they stand and judge for themselves. However,we have accepted
the Journal of Law and Society’sinvitation, for which we are also grateful, to briefly reply to Palmer
and Martin because we think that their failure to engage with our claim is itself significant. It is
indeed representative of the most significant feature of the current UK polity: the hegemony of
left-liberal political views, which, at the level of discourse, dominate by ignoring or disparaging
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialLicense, which permits use, distribu-
tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the original workis properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© The Authors. Journal of Law and Society published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of CardiffUniversity (CU).
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jols J.Law Soc. ;:–.
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