Commoner Royal Relations (CRR)

In the United Kingdom and the realms – those countries that recognise Elizabeth II as their Queen – there are certain fundamental constitutional principles. One of these is that much of the legal basis of executive power derives from the Crown, though this has, in the past, often been downplayed for political and other reasons. Indeed, in the Commonwealth as a whole, political independence has often been equated with the reduction of the Crown to a position of subservience to the political executive. What remains important is the position of the Crown as an organising principle of government (the framework upon which the structure of government is built ), as a source of legitimacy, and as a symbol for permanent government. Executive power, therefore, remains based on the royal prerogative, and the “third source” of authority (the legal powers of the legal natural person, as the Crown is a corporation aggregate), as well as upon statute law. Within the scope of the royal prerogative, the Sovereign once had a comparatively free hand to act. Yet even these powers are now limited by the legal concept of convention, and, more recently, by the principles of administrative law. The Sovereign enjoyed certain powers, but these were to be exercised (for the most part) by Ministers responsible to Parliament, rather than by the Sovereign personally, without, however, prior authorisation – or subsequent validation – by Parliament. There has recently been some discussion of curtailing or even abolishing, the royal prerogative, in the United Kingdom, in New Zealand, and elsewhere. In the United Kingdom this call has been particularly associated with the deployment of troops to foreign theatres, though it can scarcely be called a “groundswell” of public opinion demanding comprehensive replacement of the royal prerogative, as Harris could be inferred to suggest is the case. A draft Constitutional Renewal Bill was published in the United Kingdom in March 2008, containing provisions for the statutory replacement of a modest selection of royal prerogative powers. Other steps may follow.

2017

This chapter argues that monarchy—as conceptual abstraction, ‘the rule of one’—has provided to many modern political actors a way of imagining the nation as possessed of a unitary centre of identity and sovereignty, with the monarch as the conceptual—and not just, or even necessarily, the practical/political—apex. The royal nation has thus been a fundamentally important, though scarcely theorized upon, phenomenon in global history and the history of political thought. To build the argument, the chapter draws upon debates in global intellectual history and monarchy studies, as well as upon primary sources from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, Canada, India, Italy, and Japan. By analysing mobilities of political actors, ideas of rulership, and theologies, it shows how monarchy was often constructed—in transcontinentally entangled ways—as a privileged route to forming a modern nation. The royal nation became a debating centre for varied conceptions of power, includ...

Monarchy is liberalism’s little secret. Given the number of articles and books appearing every year dealing with liberal democracy as the hallmark of contemporary western societies, it is astonishing that monarchy is rarely ever mentioned despite the fact that monarchy, and not a republic, is the constitutional form of quite a number of western liberal states. I argue that considering the political reality of the established monarchies in Europe leads into a dilemma: either contemporary liberalism is not the kind of theory it claims to be, or it has to reconsider its central tenets. In conclusion I show that the dilemma cannot be solved or avoided but needs to be embraced by conceiving liberalism not as an applied moral theory but as a political theory that leaves room for various symbolic self-understandings and acknowledges the crooked timber of historical realities.

Gdańskie Studia Prawnicze (Gdansk Legal Studies), Vol. XXXVIII, 2017

Paper deals with the reality of the situation when royalty ruled the world, and when no one but royals were allowed to write under penalty of death. Thus, a 'closed' or controlled environment with the created illusion of freedom & the unification of royalty to preserve that status quo.

Notes and Records of The Royal Society, 2010

For more than three centuries, the Royal Society has played a notable part in the history of the British Empire and in the Commonwealth that succeeded it. In many ways, the history of the Royal Society itself reflects the history of Britain, its colonies, and its Dominions in the pursuit of natural knowledge. This paper considers leading features in the history of Anglo-Commonwealth relations, paying particular attention to people and events that, during the twentieth century, presented the Royal Society-and, by extension, British science-with choices that shape the Western world today.

Bulletin of the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy, 1987

Throughout the British Dominions the Crown still reigns as the master image in a complex tradition of doctrinal practices which shape the institutional structure of our public and private lives. Understood as the fountain of law and justice, the Crown represents both an interpretative field and a system of political obligation. Lawyers and judges in the self-governing Dominions treat the Crown-in-Parliament as a metonym for legal authority having its genesis outside and apart from the everyday life of modern civil society. Accordingly, the core problem posed by orthodox constitutional scholarship and doctrinal practice in the federal Dominions-Canada and Australia, in particular-is whether that legal image of authority, resting as it does on the political symbols and jurisprudential trappings of a monarchical tradition of sovereignty-from-above tracing its ancestry back to the feudal era, can be squared with the political realities of a modern liberal democratic nation-state. Is the monarchical form of the Australian or the Canadian constitution at odds with the substantive realities of everyday political life? This essay represents an early draft of the introductory portion of book later published as: Andrew Fraser, The Spirit of the Laws: Republicanism and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).

How embarrassing. Watching the Royal wedding and listening to media talking heads enthuse about Great Britain Incorporated and the "branding" of Britain around the world. Comments about a 5-star dinner following the wedding. All upper, upper class. The super-rich. The celebrity crowd of royals and relatives and friends. With three billion people peeking in as best they can.

2018

This thesis questions whether a fairly modest monarchical arrangement, Democratic Parliamentary Monarchy (DPM), is a morally acceptable form of state. First, I offer a case for DPM by outlining a justification of monarchical arrangements within the framework of liberal democracy. The justification especially demonstrates how contemporary DPM's

This article states a claim about the fundamental nature of monarchy as something which in antiquity and medievality straddled the immanent and transcendent worlds but which is only half understood in a modernity where the world which is wholly immanent and so has a politics which must be theorised in wholly consistent terms. It draws on theories of antique monarchy, medieval monarchy, constitutional monarchy and popular sovereignty, and asserts three distinctive arguments: that politics is always fundamentally torn between law and power, that the philosophy of political history requires us to see that our resources for attempting to resolve the two have been narrowed in the last two hundred years, and that monarchy, theoretically considered, is best understood as something which has a transconsistent political logic.