Interpreting Dicey

Abstract

Mark Walters’s book examines the intellectual development and legacy of Albert Venn Dicey, one of the most influential constitutional theorists of the twentieth century. By sifting through an impressive array of published and unpublished sources, Walters reconstructs Dicey’s characteristic legal turn of mind and invites readers to interpret it in the best possible light by highlighting implicit, but unarticulated, connections between his theory of constitutional law and the much older tradition of common law constitutionalism. The book deepens one’s understanding of the historical context that enveloped and informed Dicey’s distinct legal perspective and convincingly debunks the popular assumption that his influential constitutional theory repurposes Austinian conceptions of law and sovereignty. Furthermore, the book questions whether other aspects of Dicey’s constitutional theory – particularly, his provocative excursus on the relationship between the rule of law and droit administratif – should be reconsidered in light of subtle revisions in his later works. While Walters’s pluralistic interpretation of Dicey’s assessment of droit administratif is more tentative, it sheds an important new light on how his highly influential constitutional theory might be rehabilitated to enable contemporary public lawyers and theorists to grapple with otherwise intractable problems through the common law method of reasoning.