ABSTRACT
Despite its centrality to the constitutions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the Crown remains enigmatic, misunderstood and difficult to define. Is it the government, the state, the Queen, a ‘corporation sole’, an illusory construct and mask for executive power, or a shapeshifting entity that combines all these features? Legal scholars and social scientists have written extensively on the problems of theorising the state yet these literatures tend to work in isolation. This chapter brings together different disciplinary and empirical perspectives to analyse the Crown as an embodied form of statehood. While the Crown is typically seen as a metonym for the state, I argue that these concepts do not map the same semantic terrain. Moving beyond the ontological question of ‘what is the Crown’, I suggest we focus instead on what the Crown does, and what the Crown idea makes possible politically and constitutionally. Borrowing from Mitchell (1999), I call these ‘Crown effects’. If the state is the ‘greatest of artificial persons’, as Maitland famously argued, what can be said for the Crown? Using examples from New Zealand, I illustrate why personifying the state in the figure of a monarch is both problematic yet expedient.
