The Bill of Rights 1689 is an Act of the Parliament of England that set out certain basic civil rights and clarified who would be next to inherit the Crown. It remains a crucial statute in English constitutional law.
Whilst the House of Lords of the United Kingdom is the upper chamber of Parliament and has government ministers, for many centuries it had a judicial function. It functioned as a court of first instance for the trials of peers and for impeachments, and as a court of last resort in the United Kingdom and prior, the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of England.
An Order-in-Council is a type of legislation in many countries, especially the Commonwealth realms. In the United Kingdom this legislation is formally made in the name of the monarch by and with the advice and consent of the Privy Council (King-in-Council), but in other countries the terminology may vary. The term should not be confused with Orders of Council, which are made in the name of the Council without sovereign approval.
Landmark court decisions, in present-day common law legal systems, establish precedents that determine a significant new legal principle or concept, or otherwise substantially affect the interpretation of existing law. "Leading case" is commonly used in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth jurisdictions instead of "landmark case", as used in the United States.
The British peerage is governed by a body of law that has developed over several centuries. Much of this law has been established by a few important cases, and some of the more significant of these are addressed in this article.
MacCormick v Lord Advocate 1953 SC 396 was a Scottish constitutional law case and Scottish legal action on whether Queen Elizabeth II was entitled to use the numeral "II" as her regnal number in Scotland, as there had never been an earlier Elizabeth reigning in Scotland.
Charles Alfred Cripps, 1st Baron Parmoor, was a British politician who crossed the floor from the Conservative to the Labour Party and was a strong supporter of the League of Nations and of Church of England causes.
The Crown Proceedings Act 1947 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that allowed, for the first time, civil actions against the Crown to be brought in the same way as against any other party. The Act also reasserted the common law doctrine of Crown privilege but by making it, for the first time, justiciable paved the way for the development of the modern law of public interest immunity.
Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service[1984] UKHL 9, or the GCHQ case, is a United Kingdom constitutional law and UK labour law case that held the royal prerogative was subject to judicial review.
Crown copyright is a type of copyright protection. It subsists in works of the governments of some Commonwealth realms and provides special copyright rules for the Crown, i.e. government departments and (generally) state entities. Each Commonwealth realm has its own Crown copyright regulations. There are therefore no common regulations that apply to all or a number of those countries. There are some considerations being made in Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand regarding the "reuse of Crown-copyrighted material, through new licences".
The royal prerogative is a body of customary authority, privilege, and immunity attached to the British monarch, recognised in the United Kingdom. The monarch is regarded internally as the absolute authority, or "sole prerogative", and the source of many of the executive powers of the British government.
The constitution of the United Kingdom is the set of rules that make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a political body. Unlike in most countries, the constitution is not codifed, but is written into thousands of statutes and court cases, and found in unwritten political conventions and social consensus. The UK Supreme Court recognises principles, that guide the constitution, including parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, democracy, and upholding international law. It also recognises that some Acts of Parliament have special constitutional status. These include Magna Carta, which in 1215 required the King to call a "common counsel" to represent people, to hold courts in a fixed place, to guarantee fair trials, to guarantee free movement of people, to free the church from the state, and to guarantee rights of "common" people to use the land. After the Glorious Revolution, the Bill of Rights 1689 and the Claim of Right Act 1689 cemented Parliament's position as the supreme law-making body, and said that the "election of members of Parliament ought to be free". The Treaty of Union in 1706 and the Acts of Union 1707 Kingdoms of England, Wales and Scotland, the Acts of Union 1801 joined Ireland, but the Irish Free State separated after the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, leaving Northern Ireland within the UK. After struggles for universal suffrage, the UK guaranteed every adult citizen over 21 years the equal right to vote in the Representation of the People Act 1928. After World War II, the UK became a founding member of the Council of Europe to uphold human rights, and the United Nations to guarantee international peace and security. The UK was a member of the European Union, joining its predecessor in 1973, but left in 2020. The UK is also a founding member of the International Labour Organization and the World Trade Organization to participate in regulating the global economy.
R v Secretary of State for the Home Department, ex parte Northumbria Police Authority [1989] 1 QB 26 was an English administrative law decision that first recognised the prerogative power to do whatever "was necessary to meet either an actual or an apprehended threat to the peace". It concerned the Home Office's decision to maintain a store of CS gas and plastic baton rounds. In 1986, a Home Office circular, 40/1986, authorised the Home Secretary to release this store to a police force without the approval of the Police Authority if Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary agreed that it was necessary. The Northumbria Police Authority brought a judicial review case against this decision, arguing that it was ultra vires. The Divisional Court which heard the case recognised a prerogative power to keep the peace, which authorised the Home Office's actions. On appeal to the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, the decision was confirmed, although several more grounds for allowing the distribution of the store were also given.
SirPolydore de Keyser, was a lawyer and the first Roman Catholic since the Reformation to be elected Lord Mayor of London. He was born in the Belgian city of Dendermonde, near Ghent, Belgium.
The royal prerogative is a body of customary authority, privilege, and immunity recognized in common law as belonging to the sovereign, and which have become widely vested in the government. It is the means by which some of the executive powers of government, possessed by and vested in a monarch with regard to the process of governance of the state, are carried out.
Compulsory purchase is the power to purchase rights over an estate in English land law, or to buy that estate outright, without the current owner's consent. In England and Wales, Parliament has granted several different kinds of compulsory purchase power, which are exercisable by various bodies in various situations. Such powers are meant to be used "for the public benefit". This expression is interpreted broadly.
Manitoba Fisheries Ltd v R (1978), [1979] 1 SCR 101, is a leading Canadian property law decision by the Supreme Court of Canada on expropriation. The court held that the Freshwater Fish Marketing Act, RSC 1970, c F-13, which granted a Crown corporation a monopoly over fish exports from Manitoba, deprived the appellants of goodwill. This deprivation amounted to an uncompensated regulatory taking.
Cushing v Dupuy is a Canadian constitutional law case decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, at that time the highest court of appeal for the British Empire, including Canada. The case was on appeal from the courts of Quebec, and dealt with the following issues:
R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union is a United Kingdom constitutional law case decided by the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 24 January 2017, which ruled that the British Government might not initiate withdrawal from the European Union by formal notification to the Council of the European Union as prescribed by Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union without an Act of Parliament giving the government Parliament's permission to do so. Two days later, the government responded by bringing to Parliament the European Union Act 2017 for first reading in the House of Commons on 26 January 2017. The case is informally referred to as "the Miller case" or "Miller I".
De Keyser's Royal Hotel was a large hotel on the Victoria Embankment, at its junction with New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, London. The location was formerly the site of Bridewell Palace.
