INTRODUCTION

On 28 April 1884, A. V. Dicey gave the first of the lectures which became his best-known work, The Law of the Constitution. He had recently been elected Vinerian Professor of English Law at All Souls College, Oxford, and this first lecture, titled ‘a Public Lecture on the True Nature of (so-called) Constitutional Law’, was delivered on 28 April 1884. As a public lecture, it was addressed to the University at large. The subsequent ‘Six Lectures on some fundamental principles of Constitutional Law’ began on 30 April 18843 and had a more specialist, legal quality. When Dicey wrote to Macmillan & Co. in June 1884 to propose the publication of all seven lectures together, he said it ‘would not be a law book in the strict sense of the term, but would I think have some interest for a wider class than mere lawyers’. So it has proved. The published Lectures Introductory to the Study of the Law of the Constitution were received from the outset not merely as a work of legal education, but as a major contribution to political and constitutional thought.

The two main claims which The Law of the Constitution has on historians of political thought today are its treatment of the idea of sovereignty and its role in developing the concept of the rule of law. The second is the focus of this contribution.