A. V. Dicey

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Albert Venn Dicey

Born	February 4, 1835
Died	April 7, 1922
Occupation	Jurist, professor
Known for	Authority on the Constitution of the United Kingdom

Albert Venn Dicey (February 4, 1835 – April 7, 1922) was a British jurist and constitutional theorist who wrote An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885). The principles it expounds are considered part of the uncodified British constitution. He had been a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford and became Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford and a leading constitutional scholar of his day.

[edit] Biography

He became a lawyer in 1863 and was appointed to the Vinerian Chair of English Law at Oxford in 1882. In his first major work, the seminal An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, Dicey warned that freedom was under attack by modern incursions against the Rule of Law. He understood that the freedom British subjects enjoyed was dependent on the sovereignty of Parliament, the impartiality of the courts free from governmental interference and the supremacy of Common Law.

He later left Oxford and went on to become one of the first Professors of Law at the then new London School of Economics. There he published in 1896 his "Conflict of Laws."

Dicey was a vigorous opponent of Irish Home Rule and published and spoke against it extensively from 1886 until shortly before his death, advocating that no concessions be made to Irish nationalism in relation to the government of any part of Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom. He was thus bitterly disillusioned by the agreement in 1921 that Southern Ireland should become a self-governing dominion (the Irish Free State), separate from the United Kingdom. As extensively shown in the work of Professor Matt Qvortrup, A.V. Dicey was also one of the first supporters of the use of referendums in the United Kingdom despite his views on parliamentary supremacy.

Other notable works include: The Privy Council (1887) and Lectures on the Relation Between Law & Public Opinion In England (1905). He was the younger brother of Edward Dicey.

[edit] Biographies

Cosgrove, Richard A. (1980). The Rule of Law: Albert Venn Dicey, Victorian jurist. London: Macmillan, xv, 319p.
Ford, Trowbridge H. (1985). Albert Venn Dicey: The Man and His Times. Chichester: Rose, 354p.