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Recommended: Parliamentary sovereignty vs the rule of law

Recent Political Events have shown that Parliament is no longer completely sovereign.
In the Uk Parliament is the ultimate law making body. According to A.V Dicey who gave a classic definition of the Parliament; ‘Under the English constitution right to make or unmake any law, Parliament will not be bound by a predecessor and no other bodies like the Courts can question the decisions made by the Parliament’ . Even before Dicey’s Parliament was considered to be an ultimate and superior body of the land this according to the English Bill of Right of 1689 ‘the monarch without the consent of the Parliament will not be able to pass law as it will be held illegal’ . Even though the Act is more than 300 years old, the principle fundamentals have been established that Parliament is the supreme law making body.
According to Attorney General Dominic Grieve ‘I believe in Parliaments right to make laws and to be ultimate and to be ultimate arbiter… because it is the bearer of legitimacy in our system’ . By making this statement it says that there are no limits for its law making power. A case showing their supremacy is R v. Walker where a blogger wrote his fantasies about a girl band, the blog was in the US ‘where he kidnaps, rapes and murders the group, although he was cleared as it was only fiction this did not stop the charges being brought against him due to Parliament’ This shows that their power also exerts further than UK even though the crime not committed in UK a person will be charged being a citizen in this country. According to Sir Ivory ‘Parliament can enact that all men should be women, and they are going to be women as far as the law is concerned even though Parliament cannot change the course of nature’ this shows that...

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... overriding force, where we are inconstant then it is bound to give priority to EC law’ . This decision came when the UK law was interpreted and bring in accordance with the European laws. Showing that even though the parliament has not lost it superiority but the laws that are made have to comply with the EU laws.
As mentioned previously that Parliament is not bound buy its own decisions by saying that parliament has the power to reverse any decision it makes a case where Parliament stood firm on being the superior authority is the case of Cheney v Conn (1968) ‘clement challenged the Finance Act 1964 as it provided expenditure for nuclear weapons. As it was held that a statute cannot be challenged …for if were possible then the supremacy of the parliament would be denied’ . Parliament being reluctant to give up its powers but has to comply with the regulations

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