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 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.

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.