The Evolution of a Constitution by Elizabeth Wicks
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2008.00686_3.x |
| Published date | 01 January 2008 |
| Author | Laurence Lustgarten |
| Date | 01 January 2008 |
understanding thecolourful landscape of our ‘European’ legal world and will sti-
mulate further research. It is an essential work for scholars for whom these legal
orders were inaccessible because of language barriers, and will prove fascinating
for everyreader interested in legal history, civil law and comparative law.
Gergely Deli
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and Iva
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Elizabeth Wicks, TheEvolutionofaConstitution, viii þ224pp, pb d22.50
Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2006
‘The Constitution is no more and no less than what happens’, John Gri⁄th
famously wrote in this journal nearly 30 years ago (‘The Political Constitution’,
(1979) 42 MLR1,19).He expressed an important truth, onewell worth bearingi n
mind in the midst of thesandstorm of theory that has blastedits way through the
halls of public law scholarship in the last ten or ¢fteen years. But it is at best a
partial truth.Things do not just‘happen’ ; events takeplace within a deep structure
of institutions andways of thinking and acting that exercise powerful constraint,
generally unseen. Marx in non-theoretical mode expressed it best:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; theydo not
make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly found,given and transmitted from the past. (TheEighteenthBrumaire ofL ouis
Napoleon,1851)
For a long time English public law scholarship recognised this basic fact, and its
greatest works werewritten from an historical perspective; a paramount example
is F.W. Maitland’s Constitutional History of England, a series of lectures given at
Cambridge, published after his death after editing by an historian colleague.
Symbolically this unity was perhaps best expressed by the appointment of Sir
PaulVinogrado¡, who had begun his careeras a professor of history in Moscow,
as Professor of Jurisprudence in Oxford in the early 1900s. The current emphasis
on theory is fundamentally an attempt to infer normative content from the past,
and then to use that as a grounding for guidance for the future. This is a valuable
enterprise, but is of limited value if it becomes too detached from the historical
rootsof what remains,and almost certainlywill continue to remain, an unwritten
constitution grounded in legislative supremacy (though now shared between
Westminster and Brussels). And, though there are exceptions, theory seems lar-
gely to have crowded out historical scholarship among public lawyers in recent
years.
All of which meansthat ElizabethWicks’ recent book is particularly welcome.
The Evolution of a Constitution identi¢es ‘eight key moments in British con-
stitutional history’ which have contributed either speci¢c political practices or
normative and/orlegal principles tothe constitution, and whichcontinue to exert
powerful in£uence on its contemporary form. A chapter is devoted to each, in
chronological sequence: 1688 ^ The Glorious Revolution, leading to enduring
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Faculty of Law,University of Gyo
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Faculty of Law,E˛tv˛s Lora
Łnd University.
Reviews
153
r2008 The Authors.Journal Compilation r20 08The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2008) 71(1) 145^158
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