In my first book A Continental Distinction in the Common Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. edn, 2000), I advocated a historical-comparative jurisprudence to reconsider the development in recent decades of an English public law distinct from private law. I sought to explain related problems by elaborating upon systemic interconnections between an autonomous public law and other features of its legal and political context. Completion of that book and responses to it left me with two abiding concerns. One is the extent to which English public law is sufficiently understood as itself systemic and operating within a larger legal and political system. Another is the theoretical detachment or limited engagement pursuant to adopting a historical comparative method. Both of these concerns are reflected in the chapters below.

This, my second book, attempts to put forward a historical constitutional understanding of basic doctrines and institutions of English constitutional law, not preoccupied with their supposedly systemic character. One feature of its historical constitutional approach is recognition of the constitutional significance of both internal and external points of view. Voltaire's doubt about the effect of detachment may be compared with De Lolme's confidence. ‘[H]ow was it possible for a Foreigner to pierce thro’ their Politicks, that gloomy Labyrinth, in which such of the English themselves as are best acquainted with it, confess daily that they are bewilder'd and lost?' was the rhetorical question posed in the preface to Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation (London: C. Davis and A. Lyon, 1733).