From Pseudochrony to Diachrony: A.V. Dicey, Home Rule and the Invention of Legal History

Abstract

Pupils of the common law are weaned on a familiar diet: Coke, Blackstone, Maitland, Pollock and, on questions constitutional, Albert Venn Dicey. With Dicey, the great ‘mid-Victorian’ intellectual aristocrat, the encounter is usually brief: a few, foundational hours on ‘common law constitutionalism’, where students are taught to epitomise the man’s varied career into three apothegms: parliament is sovereign; the rule of law has near-absolute value; the constitution is undergirded by non-legal conventions. These dicta are, in the telling, simple concepts (whose truth may or may not be challenged, depending on the proclivity of the teacher); their author is essentially anonymous — a ‘smooth-surfaced entity known as Dicey’ without historical reality.