Political v. Legal Sovereignty in the Context of the European Union’s Influence on the United Kingdom’s Judicial Activism
- Institution: Jagiellonian University in Krakow
- ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4513-7997
- Year of publication: 2024
- Source: Show
- Pages: 229-239
- DOI Address: https://doi.org/10.15804/ppk.2024.04.18
- PDF: ppk/80/ppk8018.pdf
In recent years, the United Kingdom has seen a growing doctrinal discourse around competing models of legal and political constitutionalism. The situation has been exacerbated by ongoing changes in both theory and practice, which have engendered a strong conviction that the UK is now departing from the political constitutionalism associated with the traditional model of parliamentary sovereignty, in which Parliament’s legislative power is unlimited by law and the courts have no right to question the validity of laws on substantive grounds. From a theoretical point of view, legal constitutionalists contributed to provoking this change while desiring to continue to promote it by moving almost completely and exclusively towards legal constitutionalism, thus supplanting its political formula. From a practical point of view, however, one should bear in mind that the events that led to a specific change in thinking about British constitutionalism encompass, in particular, the legal consequences resulting from the UK’s membership in the European Union, including the phenomenon of the so-called judicial activism. Nevertheless, these events were also induced by the expansion and strengthening of judicial review of administrative actions, judicial shaping of the principle of legality, as well as by the enactment and application of the Human Rights Act 1998.