The dark and ancient palace of Common Law (original) (raw)

2019, The Dark Sides of the Law: Perspectives on Law, Literature, and Justice in Common Law Countries

In the course of this essay, I consider the constitutional and historical aspects of the tripartite relationship between the principal organs of state: executive, legislature, and judiciary. I focus on the law, common law especially, and (to put the essay in its historical context) early modern English law, to be precise. There are parallels to be drawn between then and now, not least and most obviously in the decision of the English state in 1534 (through the Act of Supremacy, 26 H.VIII cap. 1) unilaterally to withdraw its institutional allegiance to pan-European authority, in the form then of papal supremacy. There is another parallel between then and now within the boundaries of the United Kingdom, in that we may currently be witnessing an exact reversal of the Jacobean project to unite the two separate kingdoms of England and Scotland within one body politic (the two kingdoms already shared the same body natural of the monarch, in the form of James I of England and James VI of Scotland). In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the project of unification was driven by the person of James I, rather than by the Jacobean, English state or a majority of its people. If Referenda had been extant in the early seventeenth century, then it is probable that the populace would have voiced a resounding ‘NO’ to the unification project, mainly because of the scare-mongering that did the rounds, concerning in particular the impact of immigrants on the economy, and their allegedly detrimental effect on the English body politic.