Martin Loughlin

In​ 1831, a young French aristocrat, charged by his government with reporting on American prison conditions, spent the year travelling in the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville’s inquiries into the penitentiary and its ideological underpinnings led him also to think about the character of the political regime. He published his reflections as Democracy in America (1835). Tocqueville...

Through​ a failure of statecraft on a scale unmatched since Lord North lost the American colonies, David Cameron has managed to convert a problem of party management into a constitutional crisis. The result of the EU referendum raises serious constitutional issues which haven’t been properly confronted. The media are now comfortably immersed in the political consequences of the result...

In the run-up​ to the EU referendum, the Leave campaign has struggled to win the argument about jobs, prosperity, the value of the pound in your pocket and world peace, but has felt on safer ground invoking the threat to sovereignty. Yet the Leavers’ confident use of the term masks its ambiguity. We understand that Parliament and not the reigning monarch is sovereign, in the sense...

On 26 October​ the House of Lords considered the government’s new tax credit regulations. A motion to reject them was defeated, an unremarkable event, but then the Lords went on to delay further consideration of the regulations until transitional protections for adversely affected low-income families had been adopted. Suddenly we had a ‘constitutional crisis’ provoked,...