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Making Sense of Sovereignty, Parliamentary Sovereignty and the ‘Rule of the Recognised Helm’

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Abstract

By conceptualising sovereignty as: (i) consisting of intrinsically historical self-understandings; and (ii) encompassing both law-making as well as a form of ‘governing at the helm’ of the ship of state, in which politics and law are historically co-dependent, a unique view of parliamentary sovereignty is presented as a ‘rule of the recognised helm’. By modifying H. L. A. Hart’s ‘rule of recognition’ in ‘What the Crown in Parliament enacts is law’ to incorporate a key feature of Henry de Bracton’s medieval concept of sovereignty at the ‘helm’ of the medieval state means that the law and the law-making sovereign are mutually conditioned at the helm, even though the sovereign retains the power to govern. Such an alternative, political constitutionalist model contrasts with a neo-Diceyan tradition—which divorces Parliament’s legal sovereignty from historical political precedent—and theories placing popular or legal limitations upon legislative supremacy.

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    Jim McConalogue

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McConalogue, J. (2020). Making Sense of Sovereignty, Parliamentary Sovereignty and the ‘Rule of the Recognised Helm’. In: The British Constitution Resettled. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25290-8_2

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