Full Description
This collection brings together academic analysis of leading contemporary accounts of the British Constitution with key constitutional documents and sources while also offering analysis of the leading histories of the Constitution.
The works in question represent examples of the constitutionally most significant legislation, judicial decisions and commentaries by scholars and key actors. Its scope is the 700 years of English and then British history from the Magna Carta to Britain as an imperial power grappling with the question of how to govern India.
The contributors, presenting a balance of established academics and early career researchers, present an original and succinct account of the significance of each leading work. They draw upon the context in which it was written, contemporary literature and more modern academic analysis of the work and its author(s).
Presenting a complement to standard texts on the history of the Constitution, the book will be of interest to researchers and academics working in the areas of Constitutional Law and Politics, Public Law and Legal History.
Contents
Introduction; 1: Magna Carta: the soul of the British constitution; 2: Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae and The Governance of England; 3: Sir Edward Coke's The Second Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England; 4: The Petition of Right; 5: The Instrument of Government of 1653; 6: The Toleration Act and the Confessional State; 7: The Act of Settlement 1701; 8: 1707 Union Between England and Scotland; 9: Bolingbroke's Remarks on the History of England and Dissertation upon Parties; 10: Entick v Carrington; 11: William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England; 12: Jean-Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England (1775); 13: Mary Wollstonecraft on the Constitution; 14: Edmund Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents; 15: The depiction of the British constitution in caricature, 1784-1819; 16: Thomas Erskine May, A Treatise Upon the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament; 17: The Government of India Act 1858; 18: Comparative Perspectives on the Historical Legacy of the English Constitution
