Aileen Kavanagh (Trinity College (Dublin)) has posted Recasting the Political Constitution: From Rivals to Relationships on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Starting with a close exegetical analysis of John Griffith’s Chorley Lecture on ‘The Political Constitution’ in 1979, this article does three things. First, it disambiguates the multiple meanings of the ‘political constitution’ in Griffith’s constitutional scholarship. Second, it traces the intellectual shift in British constitutional thought from the ‘political constitution’ to ‘political constitutionalism’ in the 21st century. By casting constitutional questions in terms of an oppositional narrative between ‘political versus legal constitutionalism, I argue that the shift to ‘political constitutionalism’ engendered an unduly polarised, dichotomised, and reductivist approach to understanding British constitutional law. Third, the article claims that in order to understand and illuminate the key features of the British constitutional order, we need to move beyond the polarities of legal versus political constitutionalism to embrace a multi-institutional, collaborative, and relational account of constitutional government which combines both political and legal dimensions of the constitutional order. This account, I suggest, provides a more accurate and illuminating portrayal of constitutional realities, whilst challenging us to explore those realities in relational rather than purely rivalrous terms.
Highly recommended.