A.V. Dicey and the Common Law Constitutional Tradition

Mark Walters is Dean and Professor of Law at Queen's University, Ontario. He is recognized as one of Canada's leading scholars in public and constitutional law, legal history and legal theory. He has taught law at the University of Oxford, and he was the F.R. Scott Professor of Public and Constitutional Law at McGill University, Canada. He has held a Sir Neil MacCormick Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, a Herbert Smith Visitorship at the University of Cambridge, and the H.L.A. Hart Fellowship at the University of Oxford.

• 1. Introduction; 2. The biggest legal mind we have; 3. Young Dicey in Oxford; 4. Dicey the common lawyer; 5. Dicey and the art and science of law; 6. Lectures introductory to the law of the constitution; 7. Dicey's legal constitution; 8. The law of parliamentary sovereignty; 9. The supremacy of ordinary law; 10. Sovereignty and the spirit of legality; 11. Dicey's administrative law blind spot; 12. Towards a discursive legalism; 13 The constitution in the common law tradition; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

'In this highly engaging and elegantly written book, Mark Walters skilfully combines biography, history, constitutional law, jurisprudence and moral theory to give us a compelling account of Dicey and his thinking. He presents a major challenge to the orthodox picture of Dicey as a legal positivist writing in the shadow of John Austin. We find in these pages a more complex and sophisticated thinker, developing an understanding of law as a discourse of reason, closer to the work of his friends Henry Sidgwick and T. H. Green. Anyone interested in the nature of common law constitutionalism, as a distinctive account of the legal order, will be gripped by this very fine book. It enables us to see why, despite the frequently dismissive criticism, Dicey's work has rightly remained so interesting and influential. We can grasp the profound implications for human freedom of constitutional law being, in its common law conception, 'ordinary' law.' T. R. S. Allan, Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Law, University of Cambridge