Brexit's Constitutional Dimensions

Abstract

The UK has left the EU, and in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 it has legislated to manage withdrawal. The EUWA takes a snapshot of EU law, domesticates it as “retained EU law”, and establishes how it operates in a backward-facing way on prior domestic law. This article examines constitutionally significant dimensions – forward-facing and backward-facing – of this legislative picture. First, retained EU law arguably has important forward-facing ramifications vis-à-vis future Acts of Parliament. Second, there are dramatic constitutional implications of the EUWA’s backward-facing operation – particularly in what it illustrates about Parliament’s power to reorder relations between prior statutes in a wide-ranging and systematic way.

The first half of this paper has now been refined and is available here: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4005350

Keywords: Brexit, parliamentary sovereignty, European Union Withdrawal Act 2018, EU Law

JEL Classification: K00, K10, K19, K30, K39, K40, K49