Description: Featuring contributions from leading scholars of history, law and politics, this path-breaking work traces the development of the United Kingdom's constitution from Anglo-Saxon times and explores its role in the creation, exercise and control of public power. Chapters in Volume One, entitled 'Exploring the Constitution', approach the constitution and its history from various scholarly perspectives, and provide historically sensitive discussions of constitutional actors and institutions, and transformations of the constitution. Essays in Volume Two, entitled 'The Changing Constitution' examine the development of the constitution from the departure of the Romans up to the present day and beyond. This is the first, wide-ranging history of the constitution to be published for decades. By its cross-disciplinary approach, taking account of the latest legal, political and historical scholarship on the constitution, it fills a large gap in the literature of the constitution, and in political thought and British history.
Brief description: Peter Cane has written widely in areas of public law, private law and legal theory. He is co-editor (with Lisa Ford and Mark McMillan) of The Cambridge Legal History of Australia and author of Controlling Administrative Power: An Historical Comparison (2016). He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and Emeritus Distinguished Professor of the Australian National University.
Review Quotes: 'Peter Cane and Harshan Kumarasingham have gathered together an outstanding group of authors, and they have produced a work of the highest quality ... the present work is genuinely a constitutional history of the entire United Kingdom and its constituent parts ... Unlike previous constitutional histories ... this work is jointly authored by historians, lawyers and political scientists. This is of enormous value in making sense of our constitution, as it is based not only on legal documents, or on political understandings and practices, but on a combination of law, politics and practice which encompasses more than one academic discipline.' The Right Honourable The Lord Reed of Allermuir, President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom