scholarly journals PARLIAMENTARY PRIVILEGE IN R V WHITE (LORD HANNINGFIELD) 2016 ALL EQUAL BEFORE THE LAW?

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-139
Author(s):  
Murdoch Thomson

Enshrined within the Bill of Rights of 1689, parliamentary privilege continues to act as a guarantor of democracy and parliamentary supremacy, by providing a shield from unwarranted interference from the executive, the courts and others. Central to the constitutional arrangement of the United Kingdom, the functions and works of Parliament is of paramount importance. Parliamentarians, including Members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, when conducting public duties must be safeguarded to ensure the discharge of such parliamentary business is conducted to the highest possible standard without fear or favour but with professional integrity.

Author(s):  
Akhileshwar Pathak

Business contracts are formed through negotiations, where the parties agree on some terms, disagree on others and keep yet others undecided. Over a period of time, they see themselves as having moved from being negotiating parties to contracting parties, settling on most of the terms. The law, however, states that a contract is formed when a person makes an offer and the other accepts it. The principle arose from the rudimentary trade practices in the past. The principles coming from the prior centuries and the modern business practices may not be in consonance. The Gibson v. Manchester City Council Case, a judgement of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom, reviewed attempts to modernize the law.


2005 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Jaconelli

CONSTITUTIONAL conventions are to be found in political and legal systems of very different types. Not surprisingly, they exist in considerable abundance in those systems—the prime example is the United Kingdom—the affairs of which are ordered by an unwritten constitution. Familiar instances of constitutional conventions in British government include the following: that the Monarch is required to appoint as Prime Minister the person best placed to command a majority in the House of Commons; that governments are to resign when defeated on a vote of no confidence; that the judicial members of the House of Lords refrain from indulging in party political debate in the chamber; and that ministers are to resign from office after displaying an (admittedly indeterminate) degree of mismanagement of their departments. The preconditions of the existence of any particular constitutional convention are set out in a well-known passage by Sir Ivor Jennings.


Legal Studies ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Blackburn

Parliamentary election law in the United Kingdom has been the subject of much review in Westminster and Whitehall over the past few years. The last Parliament, 1983-87, extended the franchise to British citizens temporarily resident overseas, and allowed for a greater use of postal and proxy voting. The amount of a parliamentary candidate's deposit was increased from the 1918 figure of £l50 to £500, and the threshold below which it is forfeited was reduced from 121/2% to 5% of valid votes cast. The law relating to the work of the Boundary Commissions was consolidated, and most recently the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee has reported its recommendations upon redistribution of seats, including among them a proposal for a stabilisation in the number of constituencies at its present level of 650.


Author(s):  
ALEXANDER FOUIRNAIES

In more than half of the democratic countries in the world, candidates face legal constraints on how much money they can spend on their electoral campaigns, yet we know little about the consequences of these restrictions. I study how spending limits affect UK House of Commons elections. I contribute new data on the more than 70,000 candidates who ran for a parliamentary seat from 1885 to 2019, and I document how much money each candidate spent, how they allocated their resources across different spending categories, and the spending limit they faced. To identify the effect on elections, I exploit variation in spending caps induced by reforms of the spending-limit formula that affected some but not all constituencies. The results indicate that when the level of permitted spending is increased, the cost of electoral campaigns increases, which is primarily driven by expenses related to advertisement and mainly to the disadvantage of Labour candidates; the pool of candidates shrinks and elections become less competitive; and the financial and electoral advantages enjoyed by incumbents are amplified.


2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1, 2 & 3) ◽  
pp. 2002
Author(s):  
Noel Cox

Conrad Black, a prominent publisher and businessman in both Canada and the United Kingdom, submitted his name for one of the peerages to be created for the new-model House of Lords following the House of Lords Act 1999.1 The rights and duties of peers depend entirely upon custom.2 The principal legal distinction of British peers is — or was — their right to sit and vote in Parliament.3 Not all peers however were Lords of Parliament (principally the Irish peers not also possessing another peerage entitling them to a seat), and some Lords of Parliament, the bishops, are not peers.4 Essentially, Black was seeking, and had been promised, a seat in the upper house of the British Parliament.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Andrejevic

In February 2009 the House of Lords Constitutional Committee in the United Kingdom published the report Surveillance: Citizens and the State. Some have hailed this as a landmark document. The following is one of four commentaries that the editors of Surveillance & Society solicited in response to the report.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kareem Adebayo Olatoye ◽  
Abubakri Yekini

The globalisation of Islamic finance has brought the adjudication of Islamic finance disputes before non-Muslim courts and arbitral tribunals in Europe, America and elsewhere. Expectedly, the issue of the validity of the selecting Islamic law as the governing law of an Islamic finance contract often arises before these courts and tribunals. The article seeks to address the attitude of the United Kingdom and Nigerian courts to this unique problem. The thesis of the paper is that while the parties’ reasonable expectations in having their Islamic finance contracts governed by the Shari’ah may be met in Nigeria and by extension in other Muslim-majority countries, the contrary is the case in the United Kingdom and Europe where the courts do not generally favour the application of Islamic law. The paper advocates that the doctrine of the proper law of contract should be extended to Islamic finance by upholding Islamic law as the law selected by the parties (on the basis of party autonomy) or alternatively, as the system of law with which an Islamic finance transaction is most closely connected.


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