Lord Jonathan Sumption, "Government by decree - Covid-19 and the Constitution", Cambridge Freshfields Lecture (27 October 2020)
"The disputes over Brexit last year saw an attempt to make the executive, not Parliament, the prime source of authority in the Constitution. The coronavirus crisis has provoked another attempt to marginalise Parliament, this time with the willing acquiescence of the House of Commons. Is this to be our future?"
"Lord Sumption is an author, historian and lawyer of note. He was appointed directly from the practising Bar to the Supreme Court, and served as a Supreme Court Justice from 2012-18. In 2019, he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures, "Law and the Decline of Politics", and is now a regular commentator in the media. He continues to sit as a Non-Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal. Alongside his career as a lawyer, he has also produced a substantial and highly-regarded narrative history of the Hundred Years' War between England and France (with volume V still to come)."
(Please only play this video if you are happy for YouTube to place cookies on your computer.)
[JC: Skip to 9:45 if you'd like to avoid the tedious introduction.]
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Acknowledgement
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The text reproduced here is from the video description on the Cambridge Law Faculty YouTube channel, which appears under the following CC licence: Creative Commons Attribution licence (reuse allowed).
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Please also note that a PDF of the lecture is freely downloadable from the Cambridge Uniiversity Private Law Centre.
