Brexit is likely to pose numerous legal questions about how the various parts of the UK relate to each other once the UK leaves the EU. Deborah Mabbett argues that the recent Supreme Court decision on prorogation is therefore unlikely to be the last time the judiciary is called upon to decide a matter related to Brexit.

Even among those who welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision on the prorogation of parliament, there has been concern that it has entered into dangerous new territory. It might have been forced there by a Prime Minister who failed to observe convention, or by a parliament that resiled from its duty to remove a government which has no majority, but forced it was, and this is a source of concern and regret. Several commentators have argued that the decision paves the way for a nasty and unpredictable election structured around a populist opposition of courts and parliament versus ‘The People’, and indeed those who see Dominic Cummings as an evil genius fear that this was the intention of the prorogation in the first place.

For those seeking a calmer view, the Court is clear in its self-assessment that, far from entering new territory, it is firmly placed on ground it has held all along. It has upheld the rule of law, in the specific sense of imposing limitations on arbitrary authority. This is the daily bread and butter of administrative law, of which there is a great deal more than excitable commentators seem to realise. Below the public gaze, the courts have dug in their heels over countless daily exercises of executive power, including the mistreatment of immigrants, the removal of welfare rights and the denial of access to justice. True, the arbitrary power challenged in these cases is not exercised by the contemporary king—the Prime Minister—but by the agents and minions of the state. Escalating the level of scrutiny to the actions of high political figures makes the prorogation decision a matter of constitutional rather than administrative law, but law it is.

On what grounds can it be claimed that the Supreme Court’s decision is ‘political’? The domains of law and politics cannot be defined by their subject matter, which clearly overlap across great swathes of social issues. We must look instead for differences in method and modes of reasoning. The characteristic method of politics is the structured antagonism of government and opposition, organised around the general political orientations of left and right. The belief that the Court had made this kind of decision seems to be behind the claim of Toby Young and Douglas Carswell, among others, that the prorogation judgment calls for action to ferret out and expose the partisan leanings of the justices. Yet left and right partisanship was obviously beside the point in the decision. Continue reading →