ABSTRACT
In this chapter I argue that Martin Loughlin’s account of sovereignty as an essentially relational enterprise is a highly adaptable device with which to understand the complex relations of power and authority between citizens and government in the contemporary state. In particular, this flexibility is helpful as we apply the concept of relationality to explain the transformation in these relations of power and identity across a range of increasingly diffuse sites of territorial governance today. Loughlin’s idea helps us bypass two caricatures prominent within public law scholarship which have rendered otiose much of the debate over the nature of the discipline in recent times. In the UK, these caricatures are drawn by the ‘law as politics’ reductionists on the one hand, and the ‘pure theorists of positive law’ on the other. The reductionist approach, by seeking to collapse public law into politics, misses Loughlin’s important explication of public law as ‘the third order of the political’; while the rigid positivist approach, in repeating simple mantras about the ‘sovereignty’ of Parliament as an abstract higher norm, becomes increasingly irrelevant in ontological terms as the normative significance of Westminster’s legislative supremacy is upturned by political plate changes which re-order the constitutional landscape beneath the surface of legal formalism. The ways in which Loughlin’s relational conception of sovereignty offers a better model with which to understand public law both in terms of UK constitutional practice and in a broader conceptual sense are explored in Section 2.
