J. W. F. Allison – författare

This book provides a complement to Dicey''s The Law of the Constitution. These largely unpublished comparative constitutional lectures were written for different versions of a comparative constitutional book that Dicey began but did not finish prior to his death in 1922. The lectures were a pioneering venture into comparative constitutionalism and reveal an approach to legal education broader than Dicey is widely understood to have taken. Topics discussed include English, French, American, and Prussian constitutionalism; the separation of powers; representative government; and federalism. The volume begins with an editorial introduction examining the implications of these comparative lectures and Dicey''s early foray into comparative constitutionalism for his general constitutional thought, and the kinds of response it has elicited.

The development of an autonomous English public law has been accompanied by persistent problems--a lack of systematic principles, dissatisfaction with judicial procedures, and uncertainty about the judicial role. It has provoked an ongoing debate on the very desirability of the distinction between public and private law. In this debate, an historical and comparative perspective has been lacking. A Continental Distinction in the Common Law introduces such a perspective. It compares the recent emergence of a significant English distinction with the entranchment of the traditional French distinction. It explains how persistent problems of English public law are related to fundamental differences between the English and French legal and political traditions, differences in their conception of the state administration, their approach to law, their separation of powers, and their judicial procedures in public-law cases. The author argues that a satisfactory distinction between public and private law depends on a particular legal and political context, a context which was evident in late-nineteenth-century France and is absent in twentieth-century England. He concludes by identifying the far-reaching theoretical, institutional, and procedural changes required to accommodate English public law.

The fundamental legal and institutional changes of recent decades have brought the English constitution into question. Accompanying issues have been the extent to which its traditional character and main features have been changed, lost their former appeal and retained their distinctness in the European Union. These issues are not readily addressed in everyday thinking about a constitution simply conceived as unwritten or in constitutional accounts variously preoccupied with abstract analysis, political accountability or transcendent norms. The English Historical Constitution addresses these issues by developing a historical constitutional approach and thus elaborating on continuity and change in the constitution's main doctrines and institutions. From an English legal perspective, it offers a complement or corrective to analytical, political and normative approaches by reforming an old conception of the historical constitution and of its history, partly obscured and long neglected through the modern analytical preoccupation with its law as an abstract scheme of rules, principles and practices.