The Political Constitution Revisited

In his 1978 Chorley Lecture on ‘The Political Constitution’, John Griffith presented a critical appraisal of contemporary trends in British constitutional thinking from a functional perspective. This lecture has recently been revived by a new generation of public law scholars as the founding text of an emerging school of ‘political constitutionalism’. In this paper, I argue that today’s political constitutionalists have distorted Griffith’s method and thereby misconstrued its significance. In doing so, they have also obscured the orientation of their movement.