Date & time
Venue
Phillipa Weeks Staff Library, Room 7.4.1.
ANU College of Law, Building 7 Fellows Road, Acton, ACT, 2601
Contact
Event description
The UK constitution seems to be constantly changing post-Brexit. Some of these changes have been to the rules, whilst other changes have concerned the way in which the rules are interpreted and used. Do these changes show that the UK has become populist and, if so, should we care?
Professor Young will argue that, in the UK, it can be harder to distinguish between populism and political constitutionalism. This duality can lend itself to the use of populism as a tactic, rather than an ideology. This can be particularly dangerous when this tactic is combined with a constitutional ideology which favors a strong government and justifies executive dominance. There are signs that the UK is moving in this direction. To prevent this potential constitutional degradation, we need to reimagine both political and legal checks.
The seminar will be loosely based on Professor Young’s forthcoming book: Unchecked Power? How Recent Constitutional Reforms are Threatening UK Democracy (Bristol University Press 2023).
Speakers
Featured Speakers
Professor Alison Young is Sir David Williams Professor of Public Law at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Robinson College. She is also the legal advisor to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution and an academic associate at 39 Essex Chambers. She sits on the Editorial Boards of European Public Law and of Public Law, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a trustee of The Constitution Society, a member of the UK Constitution Monitoring Group, and is affiliated with the Oxford Human Rights Hub and with the Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government, both at the University of Oxford where she is also an Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College. In 2015 she received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship re
Professor Young’s research traverses all aspects of public law, both of the UK and the EU, and is often illuminated by reference to comparisons drawn from other commonwealth countries and France. Her main interest is in constitutional theory, particularly dialogue theory. She has published widely in all of these areas, and is the author of Parliamentary Sovereignty and the Human Rights Act (Hart Publishing, 2009) and, Democratic Dialogue and the Constitution (OUP, 2017), which was a runner up for the main Inner Temple Book Prize, 2018.