Law According To A King

Yesterday, the UK Supreme Court ruled on what is possibly the most important constitutional law case in a generation. In the case of R (Miller) v Prime Minister [2019] UKSC 41, the court handed down a judgment that we will be seeing the reverberations of for decades to come. It is an intensely political case, but the court were keen to set aside partisanship and rule simply on the law as they saw it. You may recall, a few weeks ago when Johnson announced the prorogation of Parliament, I wrote a post saying that it was a legal exercise of the prerogative powers, but evidently I was too hasty in making this judgment. Lady Hale, the President of the court, handed down a unanimous judgment that declared the prorogation was illegal, and thus, in effect, didn't happen at all. But let's look at how they came to this decision, and the key parts of their judgment... For some background: The UK decided in a referendum in 2016 to leave the EU. Whilst the result was not legally bind...

So Boris has asked the Queen to prorogue Parliament in September. Yes, he can do that. The prerogative powers (powers traditionally exercised by the Prime Minister in the name of the monarch) allow the PM to prorogue Parliament for whatever reason, and the Queen is bound by convention to consent. Some newspaper reports argue that he is doing this to force through a no-deal Brexit, but others say that he wants to hold a gun to Parliament's head to force them to approve a deal (likely a jazzed-up version of May's Chequers plan). Either way, the PM is at liberty to approve whatever prorogation of Parliament he so desires. The real question is the implications of this decision for the constitution - this is a legal blog, I don't deal with the politics. Why did the Queen consent? Well, the Queen is bound to do whatever she is advised to by her PM. Jennings set out three criteria for whether something is a constitutional convention, and we can see that the Queen is indeed...