172 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
royal acts are his Ministers. The King, therefore, cannot be sued or otherwise held responsible for his executive acts. When a subject is aggrieved by a breach of contract, he cannot sue the King, nor can he sue the King in respect of a tort. A special provision is made to soften the rigour of the rule which is known as the Petition of Right procedure. Under it, a subject aggrieved may petition the Crown for redress and that petition will become justiciable only if the AttorneyGeneral, who is the Law-Officer of the Crown, issues his fiat permitting justice to be done in which case alone, the Courts can proceed with the petition as though it was a plaint in a suit. Even then there are certain rules which though they are binding between private parties, would not be binding upon the Crown, for instance it is a rule that the Crown cannot by contract hamper its future executive actions. As a result, the Crown can always dismiss a servant of the Crown at any time, no matter what the period of contract was, because such a contract would hamper the future executive action of the Crown. Consequently a servant of the Crown cannot sue the Crown for damages for wrongful dismissal even by a Petition of Rights.
(2) The King never dies. —The King has the attributing immortality. A particular person wearing the Crown may die. But the King survives. Immediately upon the decease of a reigning King, his Kingship, without any interregnum or interval, vests in his heirs. That is the law, and the popular cry—The King is dead ; Long live the King—is in conformity with the Law. The Coronation ceremony is not necessary to invest the King with Kingly power. A King can act as a King although he has not been coronated, provided he is the next heir of the last King. The Coronation ceremony has no other effect than to proclaim to the subjects and to the world at large, who the King is.
(3) Lapse of time will not as a rule bar the right of the Crown to sue or to prosecute. —To put it in a different way, the law of limitation does not apply to the Crown, as it does to a private individual. The private individual must sue or prosecute within a stated period fixed by the law of limitation. The Crown is free from the time-bar. The statement of this prerogative right must