A Leap in the Dark eBook

A. V. Dicey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 233 pages of information about A Leap in the Dark.

A Leap in the Dark eBook

A. V. Dicey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 233 pages of information about A Leap in the Dark.
of justices who were willing to allow training and drilling.  The men thus trained and drilled could not, I conceive, technically be made a volunteer force, but they might, for all that, be a very dangerous armed body.
2.  It is not certain what is the real effect of the provisions whereby no ’person may be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.’  Does it, for example, preserve a right to trial by jury?  I doubt whether it does.  American judgments on the same words in United States Constitution, Amendments, art. 14, would of course have no legal authority in the United Kingdom, and there is a special reason why they often could not be followed.  No process would (it is submitted) be considered in an Irish or British Court as not a ‘due’ process, for which a parallel could be found in the legislation of the Imperial Parliament.  But the Prevention of Crime (Ireland) Act, 1882, sec. 1, to instance no other enactment, took away the right to trial by jury in cases of trial for treason, murder, etc.
3.  Private property might still in fact be taken without just compensation.  The Privy Council would not apparently have to consider whether in any given case property was taken without just compensation, but whether a particular law was a law whereby it might be taken without just compensation.  Suppose, for example, Sir James Mathew and the commissioners who sat with him were constituted by an Irish Act a Court for determining what compensation should be given for the taking of certain property for public use, and the Act itself provided that just compensation must be given.  It is very doubtful how far the Privy Council could treat the Act as invalid, or could in any way enter upon the question whether just compensation had been given.  Yet it is plain that such a Court might give very far from just compensation, say to Lord Clanricarde.

[71] Constitution, art. i sect. 10.

[72] See Mr. J. Morley, April 18, 1893, Times Parl.  Deb., p. 500.

[73] See Bill, clause 5, sub-clause (3).  The language of this clause disposes of the contention put forward by at least one Gladstonian candidate at the last general election [i.e. of 1892], that the veto must of necessity be exercised under the control of the British Cabinet; an arrangement too futile for an ardent Gladstonian to contemplate as possible is therefore actually enacted in the Government of Ireland Bill.

[74] It is to be presumed that the Crown, or in effect the British Cabinet, does not in the case of Ireland retain the power of ‘disallowance’ under which the Crown occasionally annuls colonial Acts which have received the assent of a colonial Governor.  The power to disallow an Irish Act which, though not unconstitutional, has worked injustice, might be of advantage.  But in truth the parliamentary methods for enforcing the Restrictions or safeguards are utterly

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A Leap in the Dark from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.