Brexit: a view from Hertford

22 February 2016

If you’d like to raise your game on the question of Brexit, Hertford help is at hand. Law Fellow Alison L Young is the co-author of a new paper in European Public Law 131 (2016): ‘Regaining Sovereignty?: Brexit, the UK Parliament and the Common Law’. The analysis makes clear that for anyone who is concerned about the role of the courts, or about political influence in Europe, leaving the EU would not amount to regaining sovereignty:

In this paper, we compare how the term ‘sovereignty’ was used by MPs in parliamentary debates on the European Communities Bill in 1971–1972 and the European Union Bill in 2011. In both cases, the language of sovereignty was often a placeholder for deeper concerns about the erosion of the political power exercisable by domestic political institutions. Comparing parliamentary debates separated by almost forty years reveals a shift from concerns primarily about the erosion of sovereignty by the law-making powers of European political institutions towards concerns about its erosion by the courts, and the domestic courts at that.We reflect on these concerns to evaluate whether a possible UK withdrawal from the EU would lead to a ‘regaining’ of sovereignty.