The English Historical Constitution: Continuity, Change and European Effects by JWF Allison
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2008.00728_2.x |
| Author | Adam Tomkins |
| Date | 01 November 2008 |
| Published date | 01 November 2008 |
thought of as a blunt i nstrument, bu t it is rather one which is sharp i n all direc-
tions.Such instruments are liable to damage all those who come intocontact with
them, perhaps more so in this context than others. Those lawyers who see the
decision in Dica as a straightforward rationalisation of a statute which is long past
its sell-bydate may not be convinced byWeait’s analysis,but they will ¢nd much
to re£ect on in engaging with it.
Jame s Cha lmers
n
JWF Allison, The English Historical Constitution: Continuity, Change and
European E¡ects
,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 275 pp, hb
d50.00, pb d18.99.
John Allison’s new book is a welcome attempt to place ^ or rather to replace ^ a
sense of history at the heart of English constitutional law scholarship. It may be
only about sixty yearssi nce lawand history were so intertwined in constitutional
scholarship that no bright l ine could separate them but, in the i ntervening period,
history has been quite stunningly and almost completely lost fromconstitutional
law teaching and writing alike. Further, such historical studies as have been
recently published tend to see history and the teaching of constitutional law as
di¡erentand largely unrelated enterprises. The task Allison sets himself ^ ‘torein-
tegratelegal and historicalviews of the constitution’ (18) ^ is ambitious, tosay the
least.
Of course, there are many ways of doing history. Allison is quite particular
about how, constitutionally, it should and should not be done. He quickly dis-
tances himself from history as veneration of antiquity which, he concedes, has
by now become so rare a point of view that no-one can be identi¢ed as holding
it. He is equallydamning of what he perceives to be the selective championing of
strands of legal or pol itical thought in an exemplar yp eriod of the past ^ a golden
age ^ which, he claims, is ‘not very historical’,‘arbitrary’, and ‘manipulative’ (16).
Characters as diverse as Sir Edward Coke,T.R.S. Allan and the present reviewer
are each accused of adopti ng this corrupt st yle. Instead, what Allison is after is a
restoration of the idea that our ‘constitutional arrangements . . . have continued
fromthe recent or the distantpast into the presentwith change or reform intrinsic
to those arrangements’ (16). This, it appears, is a mode of what has come to be
called Whig history, which was common i n constitutional scholarship until
Dicey, in e¡ect, buried it in the late nineteenth century. Dicey, who appears in
every chapter of Allison’s book, haunting it at every turn, instituted a preference
for doctrinal analysis over history (a preference for form over formation, as
Allison puts it) and, with his celebration of the unlimited sovereignty of
Parliament, highlighted the constitution’s theoretically limitless changeability at
the expense of its current of continuity (17).
n
School of Law,University of Edinburgh.
Reviews
103 8 r2008 The Author. Journal Compilation r2008 The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
(2008) 71(6) 1032^1049
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