The Clarendon Law Lectures 2025: Constitutional Agency

Lectures will take place on Thursday 6th, Friday 7th and Monday 10th March 2025, at 17:30. Please fill in the registration form for each of the lectures if you plan to attend. 

Lecture 1: The constitutional agency exercised by the executive

This lecture addresses the role of the executive in the governance system of the United Kingdom. What choices can the executive make? What constitutional effects do they have? The executive is central to the operation of the constitutional order, through its control of parliamentary business and the legislative process, its authority to make the fundamental choices for the state regarding raising taxes and deploying state resources,  and through its power of day-to-day rule.  The executive is responsive to democratic inputs through the need to win national elections and to command a majority in the House of Commons. It commands the civil service, which is the repository for expertise within the governance system and has responsibility for the implementation of policy. It is responsible for the conduct of international relations and for managing the interface between international law and domestic law. It has an extensive law-making function through the promulgation of subordinate legislation. The executive’s active agency is at the heart of making the governance system work as a vibrant and responsive liberal democratic order. The lecture discusses the legal controls on the executive in the light of its constitutional role and how they relate to political controls on it.

Thursday, 6th March at 17:30.

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Lecture 2: Parliament as constitutional agent

This lecture addresses the role of the legislature in the governance system of the United Kingdom in terms of legal theory and practical reality. It discusses the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty and how that is reconciled with ideas of fundamental rights and a presumptive constitutional order. The structure of the constitution is at its strongest when landmark legislation runs with the grain of, and reinforces, ideas embedded in the common law. What happens when they pull apart? The lecture discusses how parliamentary agency is reflected in statutory interpretation and the concepts of legislative intention and legislative purpose. It examines the interaction of parliamentary authority and the framework created by the Human Rights Act 1998 and the European Convention on Human Rights. It also locates Parliament’s authority in the quasi-federal environment of the United Kingdom created by devolution.

Friday, 7th March at 17:30.

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Lecture 3: Constitutional agency as exercised by the courts

This lecture discusses the extent to which it is appropriate to regard the courts as exercising agency within the constitution. The courts’ primary function is to identify and apply the law, which seems to indicate an absence of agency. But the courts develop the law through the interstices of interpretation and application. In interpreting and applying the law they exercise a degree of partnership with the legislature. Through human rights doctrine they also provide incentives and guidance for the proper functioning of a deliberative democratic order. A constitution has many objectives and recognises many values. The courts have responsibility for giving effect to a constitutional order which blends these in a harmonious and justified manner. The lecture explores the way they do this by articulating fundamental principles and by laying down standards of review for both executive and legislative activity.

Monday, 10th March at 17:30.

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Philip James Sales, Lord Sales became a Justice of the Supreme Court in January 2019.

Lord Sales was educated at the Royal Grammar School in Guildford, before reading law at both Churchill College, Cambridge, and Worcester College, Oxford.

He was called to the Bar of England and Wales at Lincoln's Inn in 1985 and was appointed First Treasury Junior Counsel in 1997. He was an Assistant Recorder from 1999 to 2001, Recorder from 2001 and 2008, and Deputy High Court Judge from 2004 and 2008.

Lord Sales became a Queen's Counsel in 2006 and continued to act in the re-named post of First Treasury Counsel Common Law until his appointment to the High Court, Chancery Division in 2008. He was a member of the Competition Appeal Tribunal between 2008 and 2015, and Vice-President of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal between 2014 and 2015.

Between 2009 and 2014 Lord Sales served as Deputy Chair of the Boundary Commission for England. He was appointed as a Lord Justice of Appeal in 2014.