A.V. Dicey and the Common Law Constitutional Tradition
A Legal Turn of Mind

In the common law world, Albert Venn Dicey (1835–1922) is known as the high priest of orthodox constitutional theory, as an ideological and nationalistic positivist. In his analytical coldness, his celebration of sovereign power, and his incessant drive to organize and codify legal rules separate from moral values or political realities, Dicey is an uncanny figure. This book challenges this received view of Dicey. Through a re-examination of his life and his 1885 book Law of the Constitution, the high priest Dicey is defrocked and a more human Dicey steps forward to offer alternative ways of reading his canonical text, who struggled to appreciate law as a form of reasoned discourse that integrates values of legality and authority through methods of ordinary legal interpretation. The result is a unique common law constitutional discourse through which assertions of sovereign power are conditioned by moral aspirations associated with the rule of law.

Reviews & endorsements

'In this highly engaging and elegantly written book, Mark Walters skilfully combines biography, history, constitutional law, jurisprudence and moral theory to give us a compelling account of Dicey and his thinking. He presents a major challenge to the orthodox picture of Dicey as a legal positivist writing in the shadow of John Austin. We find in these pages a more complex and sophisticated thinker, developing an understanding of law as a discourse of reason, closer to the work of his friends Henry Sidgwick and T. H. Green. Anyone interested in the nature of common law constitutionalism, as a distinctive account of the legal order, will be gripped by this very fine book. It enables us to see why, despite the frequently dismissive criticism, Dicey's work has rightly remained so interesting and influential. We can grasp the profound implications for human freedom of constitutional law being, in its common law conception, 'ordinary' law.' T. R. S. Allan, Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Law, University of Cambridge

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Product details

• Date Published: August 2022
• format: Paperback
• isbn: 9781009241533
• length: 478 pages

• dimensions: 230 x 150 x 25 mm
• weight: 0.69kg
• contains: 2 b/w illus.
• availability: Available