‘Talking in Fictions’: Jennings on Parliament
| Author | Adam Tomkins |
| Date | 01 September 2004 |
| Published date | 01 September 2004 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2004.00512.x |
‘Talking in Fictions’: Jennings on Parliament
Ada m To mki ns
n
Sir IvorJen nings made many ground-breaking contributions to the studyof Parliament.Among
them are two books written in the 1930s, while Jennings was at the peak of his powers:Parliamen-
tary Reform in1934,
1
and Parliament in 1939.
2
This essay o¡ers an ass essment of Jennings’scholarship
on Parliament. Itcommences with some observations on his method, and this is followed by an
outline of the argument in Parliamentand a n appraisalof the book’s originality and ongoing sig-
ni¢cance.The essay closes with some brief remarks concerni ng Jennings’ Parliamentary Reform.
REGARDING METHOD
In his in£uential survey of patterns of public law scholarship in Britain, Martin
Loughlin divided twentieth-century public lawyers into three broad schools of
thought, which he labelled conservative normativist, liberal normativist and
functionalist.
3
Jennings, i n the company of Harold Laski, W|lliam Robson and
other luminaries of the London School of Economics, takes his place in Lough-
lin’s schemaamong the leading exponents of functionalism in publiclaw. In much
(but not all) of his work, Jennings was indeed a functionalist, but his functional-
ism was not the outstanding feature of his public law method.More fundamental
to Jennings than his functionalist style was his focus on institutions, and it is with
his preoccupation with institutions that we must beginour review of his work on
Parliament. Throughout this es say, in se eking to locate Jenni ngs’methodological
and substantive preferences, I shall as much as possible allowJennings to speak for
himself rather than substitute my own paraphrase.
In 1932 Jenni ngs wrote that public lawyers were ‘much co ncerned with the
development of the new administrative organization which modern industrial
conditions and the general acceptance of collectivist notions has produced in all
civilized countries’. Elaborati ng, he stated:
Public law in the nineteenth century was esse ntially individualistic. It was con-
cerned with the State on the one hand and the i ndividual on the other.The State
had its organs, but they were col lected at the centre: they were not regarded as
n
John Millar Professor of Public Law, University of Glasgow. I would like to thank the participants
in the Jennings seminar for their comments, and am especially grateful to John Gri⁄th, Anthony
Bradley, and Keith Ewing, and to Martin Loughlin for organising the seminar and for inviting me to
contribute.
1London:Gollancz,1934.
2 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1939. A second edition was published in 1957.
3 M.Loughli n, Public Law a nd PoliticalTheory (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1992).
rThe Modern LawReview Limited 2004
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2004) 67(5) MLR 772^786
To continue reading
Request your trial