ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contribute to the conversation. First, it challenges the legal positivistic approach usually applied to Brexit. Second, it goes beyond the limits marked by legal studies and engages in cross-disciplinary investigations in order to ascertain how Brexit has an impact on the concepts that underpin the British constitution: the common-law legal tradition, constitutional complexity, and the legal imagination. The lack of social and legal imagination in how Brexit has been managed so far is also triggered by ‘resurgent formalism’ in legal studies. The history of both the British Empire and the Commonwealth has been a history of reimagination. According to Richard Mullender, Britain’s constitutional order is a ‘composite’ of three elements: the legal, the political, and the dispositional. The Anglo-British constitution has always tried to accommodate, by acts of legal imagination, complexity and variety within its politico-legal order.
