United Kingdom

Sealed by King John at Runnymede in June 1215 after his barons forced the issue, Magna Carta bound the king to sixty three concess...

Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act to stop courts and jailers evading the ancient writ through procedural games, imposing str...

Drafted after William and Mary accepted the crown, the Bill of Rights of 1689 declared the illegality of royal suspension of laws,...

Parliament forced Charles I to accept the Petition of Right in exchange for funds, restating that no taxation without common conse...

The Act of Supremacy declared Henry VIII supreme head of the Church of England, severing obedience to Rome after the Pope refused ...

The Judicature Acts merged the historically separate courts of common law and Chancery into a single Supreme Court of Judicature, ...

The Human Rights Act made Convention rights enforceable in British courts without a trip to Strasbourg, requiring legislation to b...

The Constitutional Reform Act of 2005 severed the apex of the judiciary from the House of Lords, creating a United Kingdom Supreme...

Parliamentary sovereignty, classically formulated by A V Dicey, holds that Acts of Parliament are the supreme law, no parliament c...

The royal prerogative comprises the historic powers of the crown, making war and treaties, dissolving parliament, granting honors,...

After the Norman Conquest, royal justices carried a common body of law across England, gradually unifying local custom through wri...

Litigants unsatisfied by rigid common law remedies petitioned the Chancellor, the conscience of the king, and their petitions hard...

Passed by Earl Grey's Whig government after two years of crisis, riots, and repeated rejection by the House of Lords, the act abol...

When the Lords rejected David Lloyd George's People's Budget in 1909, breaking a long convention against interfering with finance,...

Following the Balfour Declaration of 1926, which described Britain and the dominions as equal in status, the Statute of Westminste...