LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION 161
( 4 Institute Page 36 )*
Blackstone the author of the celebrated commentaries agrees that, “Parliament has sovereign and uncontrollable authority in the making, confirming, enlarging, restraining, abrogating, repealing, reviving and expounding of laws concerning matters of all possible denominations ecclesiastical or temporal, civil, military, maritime or criminal. This being the place where that absolute despotic power, which must in all Governments must reside somewhere, is entrusted by the Constitution of those Kingdoms. All mischiefs and grievances, operations and remedies that transcend the ordinary course of laws are within the reach of this extra-ordinary tribunal. It can regulate the succession to the crown, as was done in the reign of Henry VIII and William III. It can alter the established religion of the land, as was done in a variety of instances in the reigns of Henry VIII and his three children. True it is that “what the Parliament doth no authority upon earth can do.”
Delome, a French lawyer agrees with Coke and with Blackstone. He observes, “that Parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman”.
a woman a man and a man a woman”.
This legislative supremacy of Parliament which is acknowledged by all lawyers can be proved by reference to a large number of instances drawn from the history of the British Parliament. But the following may suffice.
(1) Parliamentary sovereignty and the Acts of Union. — The Acts of Union with Scotland and Ireland are in the nature of treaties and contain certain clauses which were then regarded as fundamental and essential conditions of Union and which were understood as not being liable to abrogation by the Parliament of Great Britain. The Act of Union with Scotland stipulated that every professor of a Scotch University shall acknowledge and confess and subscribe the confession of faith as his profession of faith. This was regarded as a fundamental condition of the treaty
- Reproduced is per original, page 36 could not he found—ed.