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Sovereignty is the central tenet of modern British constitutional thought but its meaning remains misunderstood. Lawyers treat it as a precise legal concept – the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty – but commonly fail to acknowledge that that doctrine is erected on a skewed sense of what sovereignty entails. In particular, they do not see that the doctrine rests on a particular political conviction, that the British state depends on a central authority equipped with an unlimited power. These two facets of sovereignty are now so deeply intertwined in legal consciousness that they cannot easily be unravelled and this becomes the main barrier to thinking constructively about Britain's constitutional arrangements. This article substantiates these claims by explaining how the doctrine came into being, demonstrating how it is tied to a deeper political conviction, showing that its political underpinnings have been considerably weakened over the last century, and indicating how its re‐working is the precondition of constitutional renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The constitutional imagination refers to the way we have been able to conceive the relationship between thought, text and action in the constitution of modern political authority. The lecture seeks to demonstrate how modern constitutional texts come to be invested with a 'world-making' capacity. The argument is advanced first by explaining how social contract thinkers have been able to set the parameters of the constitutional imagination (thought), then by showing that constitutions are agonistic documents and their interpretative method is determined by a dialectic of ideology and utopia (text), and finally by examining the degree to which constitutions have been able to colonise the political domain, thereby converting constitutional aspiration into political reality (action). It concludes by suggesting that although we seem to be entering a constitutional age, this is an ambiguous achievement and whether the power of the constitutional imagination can still be sustained remains an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gough Company Charges Schlag Laying Down the Law: Mysticism, Fetishism and the American Legal Mind Angel Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case Farmer Criminal Law Tradition and Legal Order: Crime and the Genius of Scots Law 1747 to the Present Saunders Violence as Obscenity: Limiting the Media's First Amendment Protection Rawlings (ed) Law, Society, and Economy: Centenary Essays for the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1895–1995 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

T he N oble L ie. T he B ritish C onstitution and the R ule of L aw. By I an H arden and N orman L ewis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beyond Complacency; Administrative Law (Fifth Edition). By H. W. R. Wade. Principles of Public International Law. Third Edition. By Ian Brownlie. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Jeremy Bentham. Edited by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart. Courts, Prosecution, and Conviction. By M. McConville and J. Baldwin. Making Good: Prisons, Punishment and Beyond. By Martin Wright. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]