Blackstone wrote approvingly of constitutional arrangements under which ‘each branch [is] armed with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which

Blackstone wrote approvingly of constitutional arrangements under which ‘each branch [is] armed with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous’ (Commentaries, Introduction, § 2). Of course, the branches were different. The Supreme Court is superficially, by nomenclature, an Americanism. But I am yet to see any convincing argument that its jurisprudence has meaningfully been Americanised. It was in the Appellate Committee, not the Supreme Court, that in R (Jackson) v Attorney General Lord Steyn, Lady Hale and Lord Hope in obiter expressed some doubt as to the Diceyan notion of parliamentary sovereignty. The independence of the Appellate Committee was not new. It was, perhaps, rather casually treated (‘Prologue’, Stevens, The independence of the judiciary) and under-theorised. But no non-law Lord has tried to vote since the 1880s. Reference to judicial independence is hardly a novelty. Have British jurisprudence and constitutional discourse been Americanised in substance? Perhaps, but you make no, and hardly even advert to, such an argument.