Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (HardPress Classics) - Softcover

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Albert Venn Dicey KC FBA (1835–1922), usually cited as A. V. Dicey, was a British Whig jurist and constitutional theorist.[1] He is most widely known as the author of Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885).[2] The principles it expounds are considered part of the uncodified British constitution.[3] He became Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford, one of the first Professors of Law at the London School of Economics, and a leading constitutional scholar of his day. Dicey popularised the phrase "rule of law",[4] although its use goes back to the 17th century. Dicey was born on 4 February 1835. His father was Thomas Edward Dicey, senior wrangler in 1811 and proprietor of the Northampton Mercury and Chairman of the Midland Railway. His elder brother was Edward James Stephen Dicey.[5] He was also a cousin of Leslie Stephen and James Fitzjames Stephen. Dicey was educated at King's College School in London and Balliol College, Oxford, graduating with Firsts in classical moderations in 1856 and in literae humaniores in 1858. In 1860 he won a fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford, which he forfeited upon his marriage in 1872. He was called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1863, subscribed to the Jamaica Committee around 1865, and was appointed to the Vinerian Chair of English Law at Oxford in 1882, a post he held until 1909.[3] In his first major work, the seminal Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, he outlined the principles of parliamentary sovereignty for which he is most known. He argued that the British Parliament was "an absolutely sovereign legislature" with the "right to make or unmake any law". In the book, he defined the term constitutional law as including "all rules which directly or indirectly affect the distribution or the exercise of the sovereign power in the state".[6] He understood that the freedom British subjects enjoyed was dependent on the sovereignty of Parliament, the impartiality of the courts free from governmental interference and the supremacy of the common law. In 1890, he was appointed Queen's Counsel.[7] He later left Oxford and went on to become one of the first Professors of Law at the then-new London School of Economics. There he published in 1896 his Conflict of Laws.[8] Upon his death on 7 April 1922,[citation needed] Harold Laski memorialised him as "the most considerable figure in English jurisprudence since Maitland."