3,3,7 Royal Assent

You have already seen references to Royal Assent in this unit. The monarch formally assents to a Bill in order for it to pass into law. Royal Assent has never been withheld in recent times. Queen Anne was the last monarch to withhold a Royal Assent, when she blocked a Scottish Militia Bill in 1707. The Queen feared a Scottish militia might be turned against the monarchy.

Since the sixteenth century no monarch has actually signed a Bill themselves. Instead, the monarch signs what are kno
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6.6 Stages of an Executive Bill

To provide a flavour of the consideration of Bills, we will now look at the stages of an Executive Bill.

One of the unique features of the Scottish Parliament is its openness. There are processes for wide consultation, an open evidence process at committees, the ability of the public and interested parties to liaise directly with MSPs, and the ability to lobby for amendments to a Bill. For all these things the Scottish Parliament has received international recognition.

An Executiv
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2.2 The problems of rule making

It goes without saying that making rules is a complicated process. Just how complicated is illustrated by the American legal theorist Professor Lon Fuller. In his book The Morality of Law, which was first published in 1964, he explored the relationship between law and morality, and the criteria by which we should evaluate a legal system (one form of a system of rules). In the passage you are going to read in Activity 2, Fuller tells the story of a fictional law-maker, Rex, who comes to
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2.1 Background information

As stated in the introduction, there is no right to privacy in UK law. In Malone v Metropolitan Police Commissioner (1979) the UK courts held that telephone tapping by the police could not be unlawful in the UK as there was no right to privacy at common law that could be breached. This contrasts with the USA where the right to privacy is a protected right.

The US Supreme Court in Lawrence v Texas (2003) declared that a Texas statute that criminalised gay and lesbian sexual
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4.2 Effect of the ECHR on English law prior to the Human Rights Act 1998

The Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) received the Royal Assent on 9 November 1998, and the main provisions were brought into effect on 2 October 2000. However, the UK had by then been a signatory to and had ratified the ECHR for nearly fifty years. What was the effect, if any, of the Convention on UK domestic law? We have already noted the supremacy of Parliament as the main law-making body in the UK. Under English law international treaties do not become part of domestic law unless and until some
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3.6 The terms of the European Convention on Human Rights

In 1952 the HCPs agreed that the European Convention on Human Rights should be extended to cover additional rights and freedoms. At the time of drafting the original treaty there were heated debates about whether rights relating to property, education and democratic participation were fundamental human rights. As a compromise these were omitted from the original treaty. Their later inclusion was achieved by an instrument known as a protocol, which, although much shorter than the original ECHR
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3.2 What is the European Convention on Human Rights?

In the aftermath of the Second World War there were public disclosures of huge numbers of cases of brutal, inhuman and tyrannical treatment of people, frequently within the civilian populations of occupied countries. Many serious concerns arose about the way in which millions of people had been mistreated at the instigation of or with the connivance or concurrence of government. There was almost universal disgust and condemnation at the disclosures made, together with a general recognition th
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