Parliament’s power to revoke any court decision is woefully under-utilised, says Dr Michael Arnheim
Shortly before his retirement as president of the UK Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger sounded a salutary warning, which, however, has gone almost totally unnoticed. He concluded his 2017 Neill Lecture to the Oxford Law Faculty with these words: ‘[I]n a speech concerned with the role of judges under a constitutional system based on Parliamentary sovereignty, it is perhaps appropriate to end with a reminder that any judicial decision can be revoked by Parliament through a statute.’
All the subsequent propositions flow from the first one; namely the sovereignty of Parliament, the bedrock principle of the British Constitution—which, however, is not as familiar to members of the legal profession as might have been expected. An open letter to then prime minister David Cameron signed by 1,054 barristers (reportedly including over a hundred QCs) on 9 July 2016 correctly pointed out that the Brexit referendum result had no binding force in law—but failed to recognise that the reason for this was the sovereignty of Parliament, which was not even mentioned in the letter.
