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A realignment of law & power?

10 October 2019 / Michael L Nash
Issue: 7859 / Categories: Features , Constitutional law , Brexit
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Michael L Nash examines the delicate balancing act between the three pillars of power in times of crisis
  • Throughout British history, the balance between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary has always been shifting and realigning. 
  • What role does the monarch play in this balance?

With considerable foresight, Professor Geoffrey Keeton wrote in 1952, in his book The Passing of Parliament: ‘It is in times of difficulty that the dangers from extremists are greatest… it is then that desperate remedies have the best chance of being tried, and when there may be a general disposition to trust a group, or even a single man, with uncontrolled powers, to make far-reaching experiments. Under the present conditions which now exist in Great Britain, this can be quickly and legally achieved by… continuing to exclude or to confine within narrow limits the right of recourse to the ordinary courts.’

This, then, brings into sharp focus the role of the trinity of powers which exist in any country

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Ministers’ decision to scrap plans for their Labour manifesto pledge of day one protection from unfair dismissal was entirely predictable, employment lawyers have said
Michael Zander KC, emeritus professor at LSE, revisits his long-forgotten Crown Court Study (1993), which surveyed 22,000 participants across 3,000 cases, in the first of a two-part series for NLJ
Getty Images v Stability AI Ltd [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch) was a landmark test of how UK law applies to AI training—but does it leave key questions unanswered, asks Emma Kennaugh-Gallagher of Mewburn Ellis in NLJ this week
Cryptocurrency is reshaping financial remedy cases, warns Robert Webster of Maguire Family Law in NLJ this week. Digital assets—concealable, volatile and hard to trace—are fuelling suspicions of hidden wealth, yet Form E still lacks a section for crypto-disclosure
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