Hybrid | Current Legal Fictions in Public Law

Speaker: Professor John Allison (University of Cambridge)
Chair: The Right Hon Lord Sales (Justice of the Supreme Court)

About the lecture

The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill 2023-24 has brought the use of legal fiction into prominence and public debate. It will not be the subject of this lecture. Rather, amidst multiple uses of legal fiction, varying in ends and means, the lecture will consider the role, working and comparability of legal fiction in the two basic but disparate areas of legality and liability in English public law. The traditional centre of the first area has been Dicey’s, or the Diceyan, doctrine of Parliament’s unlimited or absolute legislative sovereignty in English constitutional law. A significant source of controversy in the second area has been the liability in negligence of public authorities for omissions (as commonly understood) in the English law of torts. In these two areas, both fiction and using the concept of fiction will be examined for real or potential utility, detriment and constitutional significance.

About the speaker

John Allison is Professor of Public Law and Comparative Historical Jurisprudence, University of Cambridge. Before being appointed initially to a Lectureship at the University of Cambridge, he held Lectureships at Queen Mary College, the University of Cape Town and the University of Chicago.

Main publications:

(1) A Continental Distinction in the Common Law: A Historical and Comparative Perspective on English Public Law (Oxford University Press, pbk edn, 2000)

(2) The English Historical Constitution: Continuity, Change and European Effects (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

(3) Editor, The Oxford Edition of Dicey, 2 vols (The Law of the Constitution, variorum edition, vol. 1; Comparative Constitutionalism, vol. 2; Oxford University Press, pbk edn, 2019)

(4) “History to Understand, and History to Reform, English Public Law” [2013] CLJ 526 (republished in P. Daly and J. Tomlinson (eds), Researching Public Law in Common Law Systems (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023), pp. 25-57)

 

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.

Book your place

You can attend this event in-person at UCL Faculty of Laws (Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1H 0EG) or alternatively you can join via a live stream.

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Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay