Towards a republican revival?

Oxford Journal of Legal Studies

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 425-437

  Loughlin, Martin ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745728302     PISSN: 01436503     EISSN: 14643820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/ojls/gql010     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. J.A.G. Griffith, 'The Political Constitution' (1979) 42 MLR 1, at 19: 'the constitution is... what happens'.
2. Secretary of State for the Home Department v Roth [2002] 1 CMLR 52 at [71].
3. See, e.g. P. Cane, 'Theory and Values in Public Law' in P. Craig and R. Rawlings (eds), Law and Administration in Europe: Essays in Honour of Carol Harlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) at 3-21.
4. Although the precise language used by common law constitutionalist writers varies, the main approaches focus on the idea of the rule of law as the meta-principle of the constitution (e.g. T.R.S. Allan, Law, Liberty, and Justice: The Legal Foundations of British Constitutionalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), the principle of higher-order law (Sir John Laws, 'Law and Democracy', 1995 Public Law 72), or, more confusedly, of a 'bi-polar sovereignty' (Sir Stephen Sedley, 'The Sound of Silence: Constitutional Law without a Constitution' (1994) 110 LQR 270).
5. But we see its influence also amongst those who argue that the common law, and not ultra vires, is the foundational principle of public law: see C. Forsyth (ed.), Judicial Review and the Constitution (Oxford: Hart, 200); Paul Craig, passim.
6. See Thomas Poole, 'Back to the Future? Unearthing Common Law Constitutionalism' (2003) 23 OJLS 435
7. Poole, 'Questioning Common Law Constitutionalism' (2005) 25 Legal Studies 142
8. J.A.G. Griffith, 'The Brave New World of Sir John Laws' (2000) 63 MLR 159
9. J.A.G. Griffith, 'The Common Law and the Political Constitution' (2001) 117 LQR 42.
10. I say 'reinvigoration' because the language of common law constitutionalism was spoken continuously throughout the 20th century: see, e.g. D.L. Keir and F.H. Lawson, Cases in Constitutional Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), p 3 [4th edn, 1954, p 10]
11. Sir Owen Dixon, 'The Common Law as an Ultimate Constitutional Foundation' (1957) 31 Aust.LJ 240. But it was mostly spoken with a soft inflection, since for many it conveyed a reactionary message
12. see, e.g. Lord Devlin's argument about the 'Victorian Bill of Rights'
13. Devlin, 'The Judge as Lawmaker' (1976) 39 MLR 1 at 14.
14. See further, J.A.G. Griffith, The Politics of the Judiciary (London: Fontana, 5th edn, 1997).
15. Adam Tomkins, Our Republican Constitution (Oxford: Hart, 2005).
16. Ibid at viii.
17. See, e.g. Allan, above n 4 at 267-9
18. P. Craig, 'Prerogative, Precedent, and Power' in C. Forsyth and I. Hare (eds), The Golden Metwand and the Crooked Cord: Essays in Honour of Sir William Wade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
19. Cf. Tomkins, above n 7 at 69-74.
20. Cf. Griffith, above n 1
21. cited in Tomkins above n 7 at 38.
22. Cf. Allan, above n 4, esp. chs 1 and 2.
23. The error results from using these terms in a highly instrumental fashion, and his argument is subject to the same criticism I make of Harlow and Rawlings' use of a red-light/green-light dichotomy: See M. Loughlin, 'Theory and Values in Public Law: An Interpretation' 2005 PL 46, at 49 (n 11).
24. See M. Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
25. G. Bock, Q. Skinner and M. Viroli (eds), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
26. F. Gilbert, Machiavelli and Gucciardini: Politics and History in 16th Century Florence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965).
27. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975)
28. see Tomkins, above n 7, at 42-3.3
29. B. Worden, 'English Republicanism' in J.H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) ch 15 at 443.
30. For influential modern statements, see: Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
31. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
32. M. Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill & Wang, 2002) at 66.
33. For a useful overview, and attempt at synthesis, see: Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
34. J-J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality [1754] (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967) at 233.
35. Ibid at 244-5.
36. Ibid.
37. J-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762) ii.3, ii.4.
38. Ibid at ii.7.
39. Ibid at ii.12.
40. Ibid at ii.6: 'Any state which is ruled by law I call a "republic", whatever the form of its constitution; for then, and then alone, does the public interest govern and then alone is the "public thing" - the res publica - a reality'.
41. This problem was authoritatively examined in the writing of Max Weber: see, esp. Max Weber, 'The Profession and Vocation of Politics' in his Political Writings, P. Lassman & R. Speirs (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) at 309-69
42. Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (trans. Keith Tribe, London: Allen & Unwin, 1988)
43. Duncan Kelly, The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chs 1-3.
44. See Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), viii.16.
45. See, e.g. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790] (London: Penguin, 1968), 142: 'They have forgot that, when they framed democratic governments, they had virtually dismembered their country. The person whom they persevere in calling king has not power left to him by the hundredth part sufficient to hold together this collection of republics. The republic of Paris will endeavour, indeed, to complete the debauchery of the army, and illegally to perpetuate the assembly, without resort to its constituents, as the means of continuing its despotism. It will make efforts, by becoming the heart of a boundless paper circulation, to draw everything to itself; but in vain. All this policy in the end will appear as feeble as it is now violent'.
46. Rousseau, above n 22 at iii.15
47. See J.G.A. Pocock, 'Historical Introduction' in The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
48. Tomkins, above n 7 at 95, 102-9.
49. Cf. J.M. Jacob, The Republican Crown: Lawyers and the Making of the State in Twentieth Century Britain (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996).
50. J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783, (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
51. See J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
52. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London: Pimlico, 1992) at 54: 'Protestantism was the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible'.
53. See Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
54. Mark Philp, 'English Republicanism in the 1790s' (1998) 6 J. of Political Philosophy 235-62, at 250.
55. Ibid at 257.
56. Tomkins, above n 7 at 124.
57. Ibid at 131.
58. Ibid at 132.
59. Ibid at 140-1.
60. Ibid at 133.
61. Ibid at 132.
62. Tomkins does come close to acknowledging this last point when, in an earlier discussion, he notes that the ultimate source of judicial authority is the Crown (ibid at 119). But this important point seems later to disappear from the constitutional horizon.
63. Ibid at 138.
64. Ibid at 11. These are 3 of the 6 tenets of 'legal constitutionalism' that Tomkins specifies.
65. Cf. Rousseau, above, 429-30.
66. Cf. A. Tomkins, 'In Defence of the Political Constitution' (2002) 22 OJLS 157
67. T. Hickman, 'In Defence of the Legal Constitution' (2005) 55 UTLJ 981.
68. M. Loughlin, The Idea of Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
69. This seems to be the objection of Oxford public lawyers: See, N.W. Barber, 'Professor Loughlin's Idea of Public Law' (2005) 25 OJLS 157
70. P. Craig, 'Theory, 'Pure Theory' and Values in Public Law' [2005] PL 438.
71. See Loughlin, above n 50, 29-30, 155.
72. See Rousseau, above 429-30.
73. A. Brudner, Constitutional Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) at 29-33, 425-6.
74. W. Bagehot, The English Constitution [1867] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) at 48.