The Clarendon Law Lectures 2025: Constitutional Agency
The Right Hon Lord Sales, Justice of the Supreme Court
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 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.
About the speaker
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.