A sustained period of Conservative government would normally be expected to usher in constitutional stability. But the reverse was largely true for the period 2010-24. During these years constitutional controversies were rarely far from the news, partly thanks to deliberately planned changes, but mostly due to radically shifting conventions and political behaviour. Across the time period, the direction of change was also very far from consistent. The initial coalition years were marked primarily by pressures towards greater constitutional pluralism, though Liberal Democrat reform ambitions were often held back by Cameron’s Conservatives. Later, any prospect of calm under single-party government was soon punctured by the pressures of Brexit. This eventually brought into question almost every aspect of the UK’s constitutional arrangements, and inflicted painful splits within the Conservative Party over questions of governance. In particular, Boris Johnson’s populist approach was characterised by wholesale disregard for constitutional norms, and highlighted vulnerabilities in the UK’s key democratic arrangements which few would previously have anticipated. If one commonality can be discerned across this fourteen-year period of constitutional extremes, it is the largely unconservative nature of policy.

The terminology of an ‘economic constitution’ is little used in the UK, and coverage of the constitutional aspects of economic management finds only limited (and diminishing) space in the standard constitutional law texts. This is in marked contrast to other European jurisdictions, where the economic constitution is a familiar analytical concept for both domestic and EU law.

By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, England had developed many attributes of a ‘constitutional monarchy’: one that would later expand and contract, in cycles, across the British Isles. This constitutional monarchy has been subject to many minor recalibrations; more major recalibrations have occurred between 1640 and 1690, and also between 1820 and 1870. To focus on the function and form of this hereditary institution of governance, it can be seen operating in accordance to rules and conventions within three separate if overlapping spheres: that is, the parliamentary, the personal and conciliar, and the judicial.

The history of the relationship between the executive and the administration has been largely invisible to lawyers and constitutional law. The provision of the Magna Carta 1215 in which King John promises to ‘[ ] appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well’ is not well known.

In recent years, nations around the world have faced a veritable crisis of ineffective government. Basic governmental functions – preventing private violence, resolving disputes through lawful means, providing an infrastructure to enable people to meet their most elementary needs for shelter, nutrition, transportation, communication, education – go unmet. In some countries, these basic functions are met but longer-term governance issues languish, and government is perceived to be unresponsive in ways that some believe contribute to political backlashes, including those against minority groups. These failures in governance are also perceived to have contributed to a global upsurge in authoritarianism and a concomitant decline in democracy.1

Moreover, the basic freedoms protected in many democratic constitutions – freedom from state-sanctioned torture and from punishment or coercion without fair process; freedom of expression, of religion, of movement; freedom from invidious discrimination; enjoyment of property without arbitrary government interference; free exercise of the suffrage – cannot exist, in an organized society, without government effective enough to control itself and its agents and otherwise to secure the protection of those rights.

This chapter discusses the legal nature of the Security Council. It first defines the law applicable to the Council and then its nature as an organ of the UN, not a separate legal entity. It addresses and dismisses attemps to compare the Council to an executive, legislative or quasi-judicial body. Rather it is a UN organ with the primary resposibility for international peace and security, and that is what defines its legal nature. ThecChapter also addresses issues of the supremacy of legal obligations under the UN Charter over other sources of law, including binding decisions of the Council.

The assessment of cognition is a key feature of study participant selection, evaluation, and characterisation in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) clinical drug trials. Measurement science requires using reliable, valid, and sensitive instruments for these purposes and typical trial measures, such as the ADAS-cog and MMSE, show adequate levels of reliability. Due to the absence of adequate indices of working memory, attention, and executive function, they cannot be considered valid tests. Further, scoring conventions and range restrictions limit their sensitivity. Hence a number of innovative solutions have been proposed and tested, with varying degrees of success. In this chapter we review critically cognitive measures such as the Neuropsychological Test Battery, the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status, and digital cognitive tests, such as those drawn from the CogState, CANTAB, and CDR systems. These measures are all considered with specific regard to issue of validity, assay sensitivity, and clinical relevance. We propose a methodology for establishing proof of concept for new chemical entities to rescue or preserve cognition in individuals living with AD.

This chapter presents the institutions of central and local government. The balance of powers in favour of the executive within the Fifth Republic Constitution formalises realities of power. The traditional centralised French state with its local representatives controls many important public services. Developments over the past forty years have given more power to regions and large cities. These have provided a counterbalance to centralisation in economic development. The growth of Independent Administrative Authorities reflects developments in other developed countries. Nearly fifty years of the ombudsman function (now constitutionalised as the Défenseur(e) des droits) provides alternative redress to the administrative courts. The chapter concludes with an overview of the sources of French administrative law. The law is no longer primarily drawn from the case law of the Conseil d’Etat, but the Constitution, the enactment of codes, and the importance of EU law and the European Convention have diversified sources of law. Case law remains more important than in private law and legal scholarship is enriched by the participation of leading members of the Conseil d’Etat as authors.

This chapter examines the impact of the process of implementing Brexit on the pre-existing constitutional problem of delegated legislation. Its core argument is that one likely legacy of the Brexit process will be (and perhaps already is) the exacerbation of the already troubling constitutional position of delegated legislation. But it does also, albeit very tentatively, highlight some indications that the Brexit process may yet lay the foundations for improving the position of delegated legislation in the UK’s constitutional landscape. After providing a critical overview of the (pre-Brexit) constitutional position of delegated legislation - and thereby setting out the context in which the heavy reliance on delegated legislation in the implementation of Brexit arose - the chapter examines the place of delegated legislation in the legislative response to Brexit, focusing in particular (but not exclusively) on delegated legislation by the UK government under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, before closing by excavating some more encouraging elements of the story.

The public, official life of Athens took place mostly in the central square, known as the Agora, described by ancient authors, especially Pausanias, and excavated by the American School of Classical Studies. This chapter explores the buildings that housed the executive (Royal Stoa), legislative (Bouleuterion), and judiciary (law courts, or diskasteria) branches of the Athenian democracy.

In this chapter, I begin by covering the legal definitional differences between treaty signature and treaty ratification. I discuss the two-step legal nature of signing and ratifying international treaty law and present an argument of when and why signature is important. I posit that states confronting domestic legislative barriers to ratification place an importance on the act of signature, as it is easier for these states to sign than it is to ratify. I examine the case of the United States and the historic hurdles confronted ratifying human rights law. Then, I statistically test the effect of signing human rights treaties on human rights behavior on the ICCPR and CEDAW treaties. I find that for states confronting domestic legislative barriers to ratification, signature is a significant indicator of improved human rights. This finding does not hold for states without such barriers.

Why is Australia able to deal with social unrest and not decline into a society where chaos, violence and deep corruption are constant? This chapter is about why and how Australia is a country in which there is order, security and safety. Beneath our relatively peaceful lives in Australia, there exist key elements that create this ‘peacefulness’. Australia’s institutions — Parliaments and courts — provide a way for people to express unhappiness and dissatisfaction; to improve laws and provide a mechanism to independently judge the laws.

Campbell McLachlan’s starting point is what he calls ‘a neglected question that is central to an understanding of the operation of the ‘double-facing constitution’ in a dualist state’ – meaning a state, like the United Kingdom, where domestic law and international law are thought of as operating on separate planes. The question is this: ‘If the Constitution grants sovereign law-making power within the state to Parliament, and at the same time allocates the conduct of foreign relations to the executive, to what extent and, if so why, is the executive bound to comply with international law obligations that it has contracted on behalf of the state, but which have not been directly incorporated into domestic law?’ Using a case study of the history of advice on international law provided by the law officers of the Crown and on recent changes to the wording of the Ministerial Code in the United Kingdom, McLachlan argues that ministers are, and have long been, bound to comply with international legal norms. But he also shows that the content of this obligation to comply has to be clearly distinguished from the question of justiciability, or review by courts. Ultimately, McLachlan’s chapter offers a revealing discussion of the intricate ‘domestic’ workings of foreign relations law, and an argument for and understanding of the relationship between prerogative powers and constitutional obligations that advances the rule of law.

Dieter Grimm starts off with the claim that fundamental rights, at their origins, were double-faced – proclaimed as universal, but made positive only through, and in, the laws and territories of states. His contribution then shows how this double–faced character was lost from view, only to resurface in the era of legally binding international human rights instruments. The adoption of these instruments, Grimm argues, ‘has changed the conditions under which fundamental rights in state constitutions operate & The national bills cannot be interpreted and applied anymore in a purely national perspective. As far as the rights from different sources overlap, both have to be taken into account and accommodated. This brings back the double–faced character to national fundamental rights’, this time, though, within the realm of positive law. The focus of Grimm’s chapter is on the work of domestic and international courts in accommodating these double-faced rights provisions and their demands. Grimm concludes his chapter by returning to his own judicial experience with a variant of the overarching question raised by Helmut Aust: the question of how local institutions – local democracy, local rights protection – can coexist with ‘hyperglobalization’.

The government is unique among speakers because of its coercive power as sovereign, its considerable resources, its privileged access to key information, and its wide variety of speaking roles as policymaker, commander-in-chief, employer, educator, health care provider, property owner, and more. The government’s expressive choices—and by this I mean the government’s choices about whether and when to speak, what to say, how to say it, and to whom—are neither inevitably good nor evil, but instead vary widely in their effects as well as their motives. Through its speech, the government informs, challenges, teaches, and inspires. Through its speech, the government also threatens, deceives, distracts, and vilifies. This chapter shines a light on the government’s speech in its many manifestations, with its vast array of audiences, topics, means, motives, and consequences. The more we recognize the volume and variety of the government’s speech in our lives, the more thoughtfully we can puzzle over its constitutional implications. After identifying some of the motivations for and consequences of those choices, this chapter introduces available options for constructively influencing them.

While Alexis de Tocqueville is most famous for his analysis of American democracy, this chapter argues that when it came to France, he preferred parliamentarism over the American constitutional model. During his long career in French parliamentary politics, Tocqueville in fact developed a distinctive theory of parliamentarism, which was different from Constant’s, but which also differed from the conception of parliamentarism propagated by Constant’s great rivals, the Doctrinaires. Tocqueville rejected Constant’s argument for a monarch who reigned but did not govern. However, he agreed with Constant that corruption posed a severe threat to the survival of French parliamentarism.