ABSTRACT
Conventions rear their heads in a great many areas of the British constitution. Dicey considers a number of the more prominent examples below.
AV Dicey, An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 10th edn (1959), pp 419-21
… In short, by the side of our written law, there has grown up an unwritten or conventional constitution. When an Englishman speaks of the conduct of a public man being constitutional or unconstitutional, he means something wholly different from what he means by conduct being legal or illegal. A famous vote of the House of Commons, passed on the motion of a great statesman, once declared that the then ministers of the Crown did not possess the confidence of the House of Commons, and that their continuance in office was therefore at variance with the spirit of the constitution. The truth of such a
position, according to the traditional principles on which public men have acted for some generations, cannot be disputed; but it would be in vain to seek for any trace of such doctrines in any page of our written law. The proposer of that motion did not mean to charge the existing ministry with any illegal act, with any act which could be made the subject either of a prosecution in a lower court or of impeachment in the High Court of Parliament itself. He did not mean that they, ministers of the Crown, appointed during the pleasure of the Crown, committed any breach of the law of which the law could take cognisance, by retaining possession of their offices till such time as the Crown should think good to dismiss them from those offices. What he meant was that the general course of their policy was one which, to a majority of the House of Commons, did not seem to be wise or beneficial to the nation, and that therefore, according to a conventional code as well understood and as effectual as the written law itself, they were bound to resign offices of which the House of Commons no longer held them to be worthy.’ [Freeman, Growth of the English Constitution, 1st edn (1872), pp 109-10.]
The one exception which can be taken to this picture of our conventional constitution is the contrast drawn in it between the ‘written law’ and the ‘unwritten constitution’; the true opposition, as already pointed out, is between laws properly so called, whether written or unwritten, and understandings or practices which, though commonly observed, are not laws in any true sense of that word at all. But this inaccuracy is hardly more than verbal, and we may gladly accept Mr Freeman’s words as a starting-point whence to inquire into the nature or common quality of the maxims which make up our body of constitutional morality.
