Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution

A year after the publication of Dicey's "Law of the Constitution," William Gladstone was reading it aloud in the House of Commons, citing it as authority. It remains, to this day, a starting point for the study of the English Constitution and comparative constitutional law. "Law of the Constitution" elucidates the guiding principles of the modern constitution of England: the legislative sovereignty of Parliament, the rule of law, and the binding force of unwritten conventions. Dicey's goal was "to provide students with a manual which may impress these leading principles on their minds, and thus may enable them to study with benefit in Blackstone's "Commentaries" and other treatises of the like nature those legal topics which, taken together, make up the constitutional law of England." Albert Venn Dicey (1835 1922) was Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford University from 1882 to 1909. "