Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. A. V. Dicey

of early society. The fictions of the Courts have in the hands of lawyers

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      such as Coke served the cause both of justice and of freedom, and served it when it could have been defended by no other weapons. For there are social conditions under which legal fictions or subtleties afford the sole means of establishing that rule of equal and settled law which is the true basis of English civilisation. Nothing can be more pedantic, nothing more artificial, nothing more unhistorical, than the reasoning by which Coke induced or compelled James to forego the attempt to withdraw cases from the Courts for his Majesty’s personal determination.⁹ But no achievement of sound argument, or stroke of enlightened statesmanship, ever established a rule more essential to the very existence of the constitution than the principle enforced by the obstinacy and the fallacies of the great Chief-Justice. Oddly enough, the notion of an ideal constitution corrupted by the technicalities of lawyers is at bottom a delusion of the legal imagination. The idea of retrogressive progress is merely one form of the appeal to precedent. This appeal has made its appearance at every crisis in the history of England, and indeed no one has stated so forcibly as my friend Mr. Freeman himself the peculiarity of all English efforts to extend the liberties of the country, namely, that these attempts at innovation have always assumed the form of an appeal to preexisting rights. But the appeal to precedent is in the law courts merely a useful fiction by which judicial decision conceals its transformation into judicial legislation; and a fiction is none the less a fiction because it has emerged from the Courts into the field of politics or of history. Here, then, the astuteness of lawyers has imposed upon the simplicity of historians. Formalism and antiquarianism have, so to speak, joined hands; they have united to mislead students in search for the law of the constitution.

      Let us turn now to the political theorists.

      III. View of political theorists. Its defect that it deals solely with conventions of constitution.

      No better types of such thinkers can be taken than Bagehot and Professor Hearn. No author of modern times (it may be confidently asserted) has done so much to elucidate the intricate workings of English government as Bagehot. His English Constitution is so full of brightness, originality, and wit, that few students notice how full it is

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      also of knowledge, of wisdom, and of insight. The slight touches, for example, by which Bagehot paints the reality of Cabinet government, are so amusing as to make a reader forget that Bagehot was the first author who explained in accordance with actual fact the true nature of the Cabinet and its real relation to the Crown and to Parliament. He is, in short, one of those rare teachers who have explained intricate matters with such complete clearness, as to make the public forget that what is now so clear ever needed explanation. Professor Hearn may perhaps be counted an anticipator of Bagehot. In any case he too has approached English institutions from a new point of view, and has looked at them in a fresh light; he would be universally recognised among us as one of the most distinguished and ingenious exponents of the mysteries of the English constitution, had it not been for the fact that he made his fame as a professor, not in any of the seats of learning in the United Kingdom, but in the University of Melbourne. From both these writers we expect to learn, and do learn much, but, as in the case of Mr. Freeman, though we learn much from our teacher which is of value, we do not learn precisely what as lawyers we are in search of. The truth is that both Bagehot and Professor Hearn deal and mean to deal mainly with political understandings or conventions and not with rules of law. What is the precise moral influence which might be exerted by a wise constitutional monarch; what are the circumstances under which a Minister is entitled to dissolve Parliament; whether the simultaneous creation of a large number of Peers for a special purpose is constitutionally justifiable; what is the principle on which a Cabinet may allow of open questions—these and the like are the kind of inquiries raised and solved by writers whom, as being occupied with the conventional understandings of the constitution, we may term conventionalists. These inquires are, many of them, great and weighty; but they are not inquiries which will ever be debated in the law courts. If the Premier should advise the creation of five hundred Peers, the Chancery Division would not, we may be sure, grant an injunction to restrain their creation. If he should on a vote of censure decline to resign office, the King’s Bench Division would certainly not issue a quo warranto calling upon him to show cause why he continues to be

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      Prime Minister. As a lawyer, I find these matters too high for me. Their practical solution must be left to the profound wisdom of Members of Parliament; their speculative solution belongs to the province of political theorists.

      And conventional view does not explain how conventions enforced.

      One suggestion a mere legist may be allowed to make, namely, that the authors who insist upon and explain the conventional character of the understandings which make up a great part of the constitution, leave unexplained the one matter which needs explanation. They give no satisfactory answer to the inquiry how it happens that the understandings of politics are sometimes at least obeyed as rigorously as the commands of law.¹⁰ To refer to public opinion and to considerations of expediency is to offer but a very inadequate solution of a really curious problem. Public opinion approves and public expediency requires the observance of contracts, yet contracts are not always observed, and would (presumably) be broken more often than they are did not the law punish their breach, or compel their performance. Meanwhile it is certain that understandings are not laws, and that no system of conventionalism will explain the whole nature of constitutional law, if indeed “constitutional law” be in strictness law at all.

      Is constitutional law really “law” at all?

      For at this point a doubt occurs to one’s mind which must more than once have haunted students of the constitution. Is it possible that so-called “constitutional law” is in reality a cross between history and custom which does not properly deserve the name of law at all, and certainly does not belong to the province of a professor called upon to learn or to teach nothing but the true indubitable law of England? Can it be that a dark saying of Tocqueville’s, “the English constitution has no real existence” (elle n’existe point¹¹), contains the truth of the whole matter? In this case lawyers would gladly surrender a domain to which they can establish no valid title. The one half of it should, as belonging to history, go over to our historical professors. The other half should, as belonging to conventions which illustrate the growth of law, be transferred either to my friend the Corpus

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      Professor of Jurisprudence, because it is his vocation to deal with the oddities or the outlying portions of legal science, or to my friend the Chichele Professor of International Law, because he being a teacher of law which is not law, and being accustomed to expound those rules of public ethics which are miscalled international law, will find himself at home in expounding political ethics which, on the hypothesis under consideration, are miscalled constitutional law.

      Before, however, admitting the truth of the supposition that “constitutional law” is in no sense law at all, it will be well to examine a little further into the precise meaning which we attach to the term constitutional law, and then consider how far it is a fit subject for legal exposition.

      It consists of two different kinds of rules.

      Constitutional law, as the term is used in England, appears to include all rules which directly or indirectly affect the distribution or the exercise of the sovereign power in the state.¹² Hence it includes (among other things) all rules which define the members of the sovereign power, all rules which regulate the relation of such members to each other, or which determine the mode in which the sovereign power, or the members thereof, exercise their authority. Its rules prescribe the order of succession to the throne, regulate the prerogatives of the chief magistrate, determine the form of the legislature and its mode of election. These rules also deal with Ministers, with their responsibility, with their spheres of action, define the territory over which the sovereignty of the state extends and settle who are to be deemed subjects or citizens. Observe the use of the word “rules,” not “laws.” This employment of terms is intentional. Its object is