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Democracy as the legitimating condition in the UK Constitution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2018

Jo Eric Khushal Murkens*
Affiliation:
Department of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
*
Author email: j.e.murkens@lse.ac.uk

Abstract

The UK Constitution is either theorised as a political constitution that is premised on the Westminster model of government or as a legal constitution that rests on moral principles, which the common law is said to protect. Both models conceive of democracy in procedural terms, and not in normative terms. However, the democratic legitimacy of laws stems from a complex constellation of conditions that no longer involves popular or parliamentary sovereignty alone. In this paper, I break with the traditional account that bases law-making authority on the condition of procedural democracy. Instead, I argue for a normative conception of democracy that conditions parliamentary authority. I show that failure to do so amounts to a glaring omission in certain cases.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Legal Scholars 2018 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Eric Heinze, Gavin Phillipson and the two anonymous referees for their comments and corrections. All errors are mine.

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