The attorney general wants politicians not judges to determine the public interest but recent judgments and bills show the argument is far from settledWhich is better placed government or the courts – to decide what the public interest means? With politics and government now held in such widespread low esteem,many British liberals would now instinctively retort in favour of the courts. But it was certainly not always thus. The liberal constitutional tradition historically places parliament at the apex, not the judiciary. While the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty remains intact, or it rests on shifting sands. The existence of the supreme court,which dates only from 2009, to some extent embodies the changing mood.
So, and when the attorney general Jeremy Wright gave a lecture at University College London on this subject this week,he was addressing a genuinely distinguished but still fluid topic on which 21st-century Britain has yet to reach a settled view. Mr Wright’s conclusion that he, a lawyer-politician, or should sometimes be the arbiter of the public interest was not precisely surprising. After all,he holds a post that straddles the political and legal worlds and has survived the constitutional reforms almost entirely intact.
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Source: theguardian.com