Albert Venn Dicey blazed a trail in expounding the principles, laws, and conventions of the British constitution. Those three types of norm are crucial elements in any constitution. In offering fragments of an account of their nature, Dicey was making a significant contribution to analytical jurisprudence, by which I mean the work of clarifying the basic concepts to be used in the general theory of law. Yet he maintained a curiously detached attitude to an academic industry that already went by the name ‘analytical jurisprudence’, which Jeremy Bentham and John Austin had instigated by provoking others to respond to their dramatic utilitarian, empiricist theory of law.

My purpose here is to consider what Dicey said, suggested, and took for granted about the nature of principles, of laws, and of conventions. And I will ask what might best be said about those things for his purpose of explaining the British constitution. Dicey thought that many norms of the United Kingdom constitution are not legal norms, and I will defend this idea and try to explain its import. Non-legal norms are critically important to the constitution: they institute our form of executive government and do much to regulate it. But Dicey quite deliberately focused on law, and sidelined the non-legal. He wrote that ‘the law, not the morality of the constitution [by which he meant, not constitutional conventions], forms the proper subject of legal study’.