Note 23 — Chapter I · REVOLUTION
Reading edition
For the reader’s convenience I quote four passages from Dicey on the sovereignty in England. The references are to the first English edition.
“If the true ruler or political sovereign of England were, as was once the case, the King, legislation might be carried out in accordance with the King’s will by one of two methods.”—The Law of the Constitution, p. 354.
“Parliament is, from a merely legal point of view, the absolute sovereign of the British Empire.”—Ibid.
“The electorate is, in fact, the sovereign of England. It is a body which does not, and from its nature hardly can, itself legislate, and which, owing chiefly to historical causes, has left in existence a theoretically supreme legislature.”—Ibid., p. 355.
“Our modern mode of constitutional morality secures, though in a roundabout way, what is called abroad ‘the sovereignty of the people.’”—Ibid.