The Legal and Political Dimensions of Unwritten Constitutional Norms and Principles

The Legal and Political Dimensions of Unwritten Constitutional Norms and Principles

Speakers:  Prof Se-shauna Wheatle (Durham University), Prof Roger Masterman (Durham University)

Respondents: Prof Tom Hickman (UCL Laws) and Dr Dora Devlin (UCL Laws)

Chair: Prof Jeff King (UCL Laws) 

About the talk

Unwritten principles and conventions are central to the operation of the UK constitution. Constitutional principles – including parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law – are regarded as fundamental even in the absence of an authoritative source text. And the UK constitution’s reliance on conventions is often regarded as a defining feature. Yet, constitutional principles and conventions – though linked by their shared lack of an authoritative textual source – are often considered separately, with limited attention paid to their common characteristics. The result is that the current account of both sets of standards is incomplete and there is a need for further interrogation of the interactions between constitutional conventions and the unwritten constitutional principles. This paper seeks to fill some of that gap. Prof Se-Shauna Wheatle and Prof Roger Masterman argue that, while at first glance there may appear to be a clear demarcation between political and legal constitutional standards, many unwritten constitutional standards have both political and legal dimensions, with the corollary that there are multiple avenues for their normative development and enforcement. In this paper, Prof Se-Shauna Wheatle and Prof Roger Masterman outline the shared characteristics of unwritten principles and conventions and provide an account of the shared investment of constitutional actors in the process of articulating, and therefore, shaping understandings of, a range of unwritten constitutional standards. Finally, Prof Se-Shauna Wheatle and Prof Roger Masterman propose a taxonomy of conceptions that reflect the varying manifestations of the intersection and relationship between unwritten constitutional principles and conventions in the UK.

This seminar is part of the Public Law Seminar Series.

About the Speakers

Se-shauna Wheatle is a Professor of Constitutional Law at Durham Law School. Her research interests include unwritten constitutional principles, common law constitutionalism and Commonwealth Caribbean constitutional law. Se-shauna is author of Principled Reasoning in Human Rights Adjudication (Hart 2017). She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Constitutions (Oxford UP 2020), series editor (with Jonathan Herring) of the Bristol UP Diverse Voices book series and editor (with Elizabeth O’Loughlin) of Diverse Voices in Public Law. Her work has been published in journals such as Public Law, McGill Law Journal, the Journal of Comparative Law and the European Human Rights Law Review. Se-shauna is co-editor of Diverse Voices in Public Law and the Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Constitutions. She is also an editor of the UK Constitutional Law Blog, with Mike Gordon and Paul Scott. Se-shauna is Project Lead of the Unwritten Constitutional Norms and Principles research project.

Roger Masterman is Professor of Constitutional Law at Durham Law School, Joint General Editor (with Aileen McHarg) of Public Law, and one of the Legal Advisers to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution. His forthcoming publications include “The Dissolution of Dualism” (with Matt Nicholson, in the Cambridge Law Journal) and “Separation of Institutions and Functions: The Core and Penumbra of Separation of Powers” (in Eoin Carolan et al, The Cambridge Handbook on the Separation of Powers).

About the Respondents

Tom Hickman KC is a Professor at UCL’s Faculty of Laws and a practising barrister. His research and teaching interests centre around constitutional and administrative law, national security law and human rights. He is currently working on project considering how the UK constitution responded to the Brexit referendum.

Dr Dora Devlin is a Research Fellow at the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism (GCDC). She recently completed her PhD in Law at the University of Cambridge on the UK's responses to adverse Strasbourg judgments. Her research interests span across constitutional law, human rights, foreign relations law and public international law, with a focus on the role of the executive. Her approach to research emphasises socio-legal and interdisciplinary approaches and academia's engagement with the outside world. 

About the chair

Professor Jeff King joined the UCL Laws in 2011 and has been Professor of Law since 2016. He is the Deputy Director of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.  He sits on the Editorial Committees of the journals Public Law and the Federal Law Review, and on the General Council of the International Society of Public Law (ICON Society), and is a member of the Study of Parliament Group.  He was previously the Co-Editor of Current Legal Problems and the Co-Editor of the UK Constitutional Law Blog. Prior to coming to UCL, he was a Fellow and Tutor in law at Balliol College, and CUF Lecturer for the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford (2008-2011), a Research Fellow and Tutor law at Keble College, Oxford (2007-08), and an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City (2003-04). He has held visiting posts at the University of Oxford (2019-2022), University of Toronto (2013, 2020), Renmin University (Beijing), the University of New South Wales, and in 2014-15 was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visiting fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His book Judging Social Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Society of Legal Scholars 2014 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, and in 2017 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law.

About the GCDC

The Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, based at the UCL Faculty of Laws, seeks to advance scholarly understanding of the relationship between democratic government and the rule of law in domestic, comparative, and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on identifying the supporting conditions for constitutional resilience in electorally competitive political systems. Read more about the group and its work.

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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