Chapter Updates

Chapter 1: : The British Constitution, law reform and the parliamentary legislative process

Parliament's role in social reform

As we have recently celebrated the 200^th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, it should be remembered that the focus of the celebrations was a piece of parliamentary legislation – the Slave Trade Act 1807, building on the Foreign Slave Trade Act 1806 – which was famously promoted through Parliament by William Wilberforce (1759-1833). However, whilst Parliament’s intervention made the abolition of the slave trade the clear expression of a sovereign legislature, Peter Prescott QC pointed out in a letter to the Times newspaper (31/3/07) that the common law had already effectively done the job as far as English law was concerned, citing the case of Shanley v Harvey (1762) and a Court of King's Bench ruling in 1772 in support of the point. What both the parliamentary and common law examples serve to illustrate is that these sources of law are the main engines of social reform in this country. A recent example of these sources working in tandem is the House of Lords’ decision in Bellinger v Bellinger (2003) and the subsequent parliamentary intervention in the form of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 over the issue of rights for transsexuals. However, where the modern example departs from the historical is in the fact that whilst external pressures played a part in hastening both areas of reform, the latter was also influenced by European legal influences arising from UK membership of the European Union and the UK’s separate obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. These modern influences indicate that parliamentary sovereignty is a much more complicated issue today than it was 200 years ago.