Skip to content

The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely, that Parliament thus defined has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.

— A. V. Dicey Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885)

Another quote →

More quotes by A. V. Dicey

Our constitution, in short, is a judge-made constitution, and it bears on its face all the features, good and bad, of judge-made law.

Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885)

Macaulay, Mill and Burke are I believe the three authors to whom as far as I can judge I owe more than to any other teachers I could mention.

Foreign observers of English manners, such for example as Voltaire, De Lolme, Tocqueville, or Gneist, have been far more struck than have Englishmen themselves with the fact that England is a country governed, as is scarcely any other part of Europe, under the rule of law.

Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885)

When a body of twenty or two thousand or two hundred thousand men bind themselves together to act in a particular way for some common purpose, they create a body which, by no fiction of law but from the very nature of things, differs from the individuals of whom it is constituted.

All that necessarily results from an analysis of our institutions, and a comparison of them with the institutions of foreign countries, is, that the English constitution is still marked, far more deeply than is generally supposed, by peculiar features, and that these peculiar characteristics may be summed up in the combination of Parliamentary Sovereignty with the Rule of Law.

Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885)

All A. V. Dicey quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: A. V. Dicey (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.