HISTORIANS OF I8TH-CENTURY ENGLAND ARE COMING TO RECOGnize that the Rockingham Whigs played a significant role in the establishment of ‘party’ and ‘opposition’ as political instruments in the life of the nation but they remain divided over the precise contribution which the Rockinghams made to the evolution of the party system. On dose analysis the party appears to be profoundly divided over some of the most fundamental political issues of the time. Its attitude towards the American colonies was at best ambiguous and unsatisfactorily thought out. It was deeply divided on reform. All too frequently its parliamentary performance was inept, its members absent and its public credit low. In office, the Rockinghams were unable to effect lasting political changes and were never able to survive for more than a few months. Because most historians have concentrated their studies on these aspects of Rockinghamite history they have tended to neglect, indeed almost to dismiss, the party ideology which emerged during the 1770s and have remained indifferent to the institutional changes which occurred a little later. Only when the theoretical and institutional developments have been analysed and their significance assessed can a balanced view of the Rockinghams emerge – and thus a more valid picture of party development in the later I8th century.

HER MAJESTY'S JUDGES ARE BY NATURE CONSERVATIVE BECAUSE their function is to apply existing law, to uphold a system not to subvert it. But they are not by nature reactionary, do not have any necessary opposition to new ideas, must indeed seek to fit political novelties expressed in statutory terms into the existing order. But, by their background and more importantly by their training, they are cautious, have seen it before, and in interpreting Acts of Parliament still work on the basis of certain assumptions which are also widely shared by those in the street below their windows, along the embankment at Westminster, and by the man in the passing Clapham omnibus. These assumptions are that Parliament does not intend to enact anydung so radical as to upset the constitution, or to deprive private persons of life, liberty or property by inadvertence but only by express words, and that Parliament generally enacts within what the judges regard as the fundamental political and economic structure of contemporary Anglo-Saxon society.

‘HISTORIC’, ‘MOMENTOUS’ AND ‘REVOLUTIONARY’ ARE ONLY A FEW OF the epithets freely bestowed upon the case of Baker v. Carr. By that justly celebrated judgment of 26 March 1962 the US Supreme Court implied for the first time that the weight of an American's vote might no longer depend on whereabouts in the country he lived. It did so by ruling that a scheme of apportionment which permitted inequalities of population between electoral districts represented in a state's legislature could be challenged in federal (not merely state) courts, which had competence to protect the right in question. The tide of ensuing litigation attained a new level on I7 February 1964, when the Court in Wesberry v. Sanders held that a like symmetry must prevail among US Congressional districts also. High-water mark was reached on 15 June of that year with Reynolds v. Sims, where the constitution was held to require