Adam Tucker

Darren Jones here mixing up the form of the constitution ("unwritten") with its substance - in particular who can change it ("not Darren Jones unilaterally").

As I say, it’s not bang on my area, I’ve not seen legal advice to Faber and lawyers would here be being v v cautious but I’m of view that the ‘problem’ is not the specifics of the legal provisions capturing all this but perception of and chill etc etc which are very valid & real but diff concerns

Leah Trueblood, "The Constitutional Principle of Democracy in the United Kingdom" (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Ahead of Print) Link: academic.oup.com/ojls/advance...

Absolutely bizarre that the prosecution chose, and the media seem to be running with, the adjective "childlike" to characterise Russell Brand's sexual aggresion.

I could have done with having Bebb's case to hand when I was writing a forthcoming piece on statutory interpretation - in which, amongst other things, I set out some scepticism about the (widely told) story that in those days the prevailing approach to statutory interpretation was "literalism".

Man City quickly out of the blocks there with the statement connecting ("strict") confidentiality, due process and today's information. Expect their appeal to include the argument that a breach of confidentiality vitiated the independence of the regulator (and therefore its findings).

A new constitution would probably just capture the existing one, *entrench* its pathologies, so make things worse Better to address those pathologies OK, could do that in a new constitution. But why on earth (even if it's possible) make life hard by purporting to address them all simultaneously?

I wonder whether this approach is driven by a reticence to regulate / ban things (or just BBQs, I guess) or by doubts about the availability of a sound legal basis for the government to introduce an actual ban. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Nb on this - 100 Universities applied. The list is just the "successful" applicants. The ordering of the list hardly shows military level discipline or academic rigour. www.gov.uk/government/n...

This, in particular. Increasingly of the view that government policy towards universities is the test case of whether it really has a wider economic policy.

I probably used up my rule-of-law-moaning-about-boring-everyday-stuff quota with the airport thing earlier. Anyway, TV licensing is also a rule of law problem. First-line enforcement for decades has been via make-believe nonsense but people have stopped believing.

And here is a view of the extent of the smoke today (from space) zoom.earth/maps/satelli...

The @fdaunion.bsky.social statement on the Olly Robbins Judicial Review unpacks the grounds (🥳): 1. PM lacks (statutory) power to dismiss 2. Unfair process (because no process) 3. Irrationality (revealed in stated reasons)

A huge swathe of the North West under the pall of the smoke from the Dovestone fire this evening. (The fire is far left, Manchester skyline in the centre.)

Has this been legislated (but not yet published)? Or is it an on-the-fly flex? (under which power?) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Yes, I know I'm a bore. But the government legislated to ease the applicable legal framework only this year ... and they're still making it look very messy to use

This is an interestingly worded denial www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Quite the shift in tone from Starmer's "crackdown" on the backbenches.

Surely now there is a real possibility that Farage doesn't stand after all in the Clacton by-election? It's not like he is bound by expressing that intention yesterday. He may well say the establishment chickened out, he has nothing left to prove etc.

This is a great thread. The rules governing all this are (i) unnecessarily weird and (ii) easy to change.

Indeed. There's an important kernel of rule of law truth in there too though: the *current* system is already a rule of law failure. (a good policy aim would be to at least come up with a solution/reform which good advocates who care about the rule of law are capable of defending impressively...)

Will be interesting to see the wider devolutionary agenda this is said to be part of. (the comparison to Trump/Mar-a-Lago is completely gratuitous though) www.ft.com/content/f304...

That AI isn't yet "good enough" to mark students' essays ought to be beside the point. Outsourcing such tasks to AI is fundamentally incompatible with the intellectual engagement between student and professor that should be central to higher education. /1 www.cam.ac.uk/stories/ai-u...

Nearly time for the @ukcla.bsky.social Early Career Workshop in Constitutional Law and Theory It's always a very supportive environment and I'm looking forward to being on this year's panel. Abstracts still being accepted. Do submit if you are hesitating... ukconstitutionallaw.org/2026/04/27/c...

And we're really looking forward to hearing from David later today! Absolutely the right moment for this talk, from this author. (Mike isn't on here. I'll tell him you were looking for him)

The Supreme Court in Dillon went out of its way not to confirm that EU(W) s7A is effective as a ground for disapplying primary legislation I didn't see any explicit doubting (I'll look again more carefully). But I see enough to make me think someone involved thinks this point is at least arguable

I have curated this year's @publiclaw.bsky.social Special Analysis section "The Public Order Act 1986 at Forty", with six excellent contributions which together, I/we hope, offer an insight into the rich tapestry of contemporary protest law and policing in the UK, through that historical lens.

All our American friends used to caution that you can't predict votes from oral argument... (Admittedly before judges said things like "yeah yeah what about the constitution?") But I'm seeing a lot of predictions already - like scorelines. Has something fundamental changed about predictability?