Public Law (GDL)

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 6
• Convenors: Professor Stewart Motha
• Assessment: a 24-hour take-home examination (100%)

In law schools throughout the world ‘public law’ (or 'constitutional and administrative law') is concerned primarily with the legal rules and processes that structure and regulate a country’s government, i.e. the relations amongst its key institutions, and between these institutions and the individual citizen. On this module you will also study the historical and contemporary social and political facts and values which qualify the function of such rules. We will look at legal rules in terms of the effect one rule may have on another, as well as how they came about and who actually uses the rules, when, and with what results.

Studying public law in this way is particularly appropriate in the UK because its constitution, unlike most other countries’, is neither codified in a single, legally binding document nor considered to be supreme law that could override the Parliament’s will. Instead, the UK parliament is considered entirely free to legislate on any subject matter. As a result, the sources of the un-codified British constitution range from a plethora of statutes (Acts of Parliament) and common law (judge-made rules) to political habits (‘conventions’), all of which are subject to change.

Indicative module syllabus

• Constitution and Sources
• Separation of Powers
• Parliamentary Sovereignty
• Royal Prerogative
• Devolved Parliaments
• Judicial Review: Theory; Practice
• Human Rights Act: Theory; Practice

By the end of this module, you will have:

• a critical understanding of key concepts underlying modern constitutional democracies and the ability to use contemporary research and debates about the subject
• a good understanding of the basic structure of British government
• a critical understanding of key rules and principles of public law, how these are deployed to devise and sustain arguments and/or solve problems, and how they may be re-deployed
• the ability to read, understand and assess key public law cases, statutes, academic opinion and media reports on the intersection of law and politics
• the ability to reflect critically on the uncertainty, ambiguity, limits and developmental potential of public law and the political implications of orthodox understandings and uses of it
• the ability to critically evaluate arguments, assumptions, abstract concepts and data to frame appropriate questions to achieve solutions to problems concerning the relation of law to politics.