Law and Constitutional Change

David Capper, Conor McCormick, Norma Dawson

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781009797719
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Law

A collection of some of the best papers presented at the 25th British Legal History Conference at Queen's University Belfast in July 2022, Law and Constitutional Change examines the role that law plays when countries experience a major constitutional upheaval. It examines the interaction of law and politics in history across different legal jurisdictions with different legal traditions. The theme of the conference was 'Law and Constitutional Change' and was inspired by the decade of anniversaries in Ireland (2012–2023) commemorating events from a century ago that began with the Home Rule Crisis and ended with the partition of the country. It studies the changes that occurred at that time in a wider British and Irish as well as international context, with a view to deepening understanding of contemporary debates such as those surrounding Brexit and its longer-term implications. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Introduction
• 1 ‘Another Sort of Treason’: The Troubled Home of Husband-Killing in Late Medieval Common Law
• 2 The Origins of the Statute of Uses
• 3 Examining the Doctrine of Art and Part in Early Modern Scotland
• 4 The Beginnings of Judicial Review
• 5 The Aspirations of James Stuart
• 6 A British Common Law?: Public Law after the 1707 Union between England and Scotland
• 7 Quo Warranto and the Borough Office Holder, 1700–1792
• 8 Land, Credit and the Constitution: Debtor Protections and Catholic Rights in Eighteenth-Century Ireland
• 9 Constitutional Change, Law and Grattan’s Parliament
• 10 Sir John Ross Bt: The Last Lord Chancellor of Ireland, 1921–1922
• 11 Lord Birkenhead, Ambiguity and the Irish Border: Lawyers and the Anglo-Irish Treaty
• 12 The British–Irish Negotiations on the Drafting of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State
• 13 No Way to Run a Railroad: The Decline of the Great Northern Railway of Ireland after Partition
• 14 Fortuna Fortes Adiuvat: The Importance of Individuals in Estonian Constitutional Change
• 15 First Nations Constitutional Recognition in Australia: Addressing Foundational Failures of Rule of Law
• 16 The Rise and Fall of the UK Human Rights Act
• 17 Courting the Past: Reconstructing Ireland’s Lost Legal Records, circa 1300–1922
• Index