ABSTRACT
Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America Vol. I (1835) Let us stay with Dicey. For it was almost exactly a century ago that A.V.Dicey, distinguished academic lawyer, produced his Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885). This landmark work of constitutional interpretation became the twentieth century orthodoxy, from which generations of studentsand even, through the public language of politics, a citizenrylearned an understanding and appreciation of the distinctive characteristics of the British unwritten constitution. What they learned, contrary to Tocqueville, was not that the constitution was a chimera, but that it was firmly rooted in its own secure principles (of parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law) and customary practices. Borrowing Bryce’s distinction between ‘rigid’ and ‘flexible’ constitutions, Dicey was able both to describe and celebrate ‘the most flexible polity in existence’ and to contrast it with ‘the rigidity of almost every foreign constitution’.1
