The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty—the principle that Parliament can make or unmake any law whatsoever—appears in British constitutional discourse as something approaching natural law. Yet this arrangement, now treated as constitutional bedrock, emerged from centuries of contingent institutional conflicts whose outcomes were never predetermined. The path from medieval kingship to legislative supremacy required specific historical conditions, strategic bargaining, and institutional innovations that transformed the relationship between Crown, courts, and representative assembly.

Understanding parliamentary sovereignty's origins demands abandoning the Whig narrative of inevitable constitutional progress. The institutional arrangements that concentrated ultimate legal authority in Parliament resulted from particular sequences of conflict, compromise, and constitutional imagination. Different outcomes at crucial junctures—the early Stuart period, the Restoration settlement, the Glorious Revolution—would have produced fundamentally different constitutional architectures. Parliamentary supremacy was constructed, not discovered.

What makes the English case particularly instructive for institutional analysis is how an uncodified constitutional arrangement achieved remarkable stability while retaining extraordinary flexibility. The same institution that executed a king and abolished the House of Lords in the 1640s became, by the eighteenth century, the unquestioned font of legal authority. Tracing this development illuminates the mechanisms through which institutional arrangements become entrenched and naturalized, transforming contingent political settlements into apparently timeless constitutional principles.

Medieval English kingship operated within constraints that distinguished it from continental absolutism, but these constraints were personal and feudal rather than institutional and legislative. The Magna Carta of 1215 established precedents for baronial resistance but created no permanent representative institution with ongoing legislative authority. Parliament emerged gradually from the royal council as monarchs summoned representatives to grant taxation, transforming what began as an advisory convenience into an institutional necessity.

The fiscal bargain proved decisive. English monarchs, lacking the bureaucratic apparatus to collect direct taxes efficiently, required parliamentary consent for extraordinary revenue. This created a structural dependency that continental rulers, with access to alternative revenue sources or more developed administrative machinery, largely avoided. Each grant of taxation became an opportunity for parliamentary extraction—redress of grievances, legislative concessions, institutional guarantees. The transaction accumulated over centuries, gradually shifting the balance of constitutional authority.

The early Stuart period crystallised these tensions into constitutional crisis. James I and Charles I articulated divine-right theories incompatible with accumulated parliamentary claims, while Parliament asserted privileges as ancient rights rather than royal concessions. The conflict was not merely about taxation or religion but about the fundamental structure of authority—whether sovereignty resided in the Crown or in the King-in-Parliament. The Civil War and Interregnum demonstrated that Parliament could function without monarchy; the execution of Charles I enacted the previously unthinkable.

The Restoration settlement of 1660 superficially restored monarchical authority, but the institutional landscape had irreversibly changed. Charles II returned on terms negotiated with Parliament; James II's attempt to rule without parliamentary cooperation produced the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Revolutionary Settlement—the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement, the gradual establishment of annual parliamentary sessions through appropriations control—completed the institutional transformation. The Crown survived, but sovereignty had migrated.

What institutionalists observe in this trajectory is a classic case of path dependence operating through incremental ratchet effects. Each parliamentary victory in the bargaining process became a baseline for subsequent negotiations. Prerogatives conceded could not practically be recovered. The accumulation of precedents, procedures, and expectations created an institutional logic that constrained monarchical options while expanding parliamentary authority. By 1700, parliamentary sovereignty was institutional fact before it became constitutional doctrine.

Takeaway

Parliamentary sovereignty emerged from centuries of fiscal bargaining in which each concession became an irreversible baseline for future negotiations—institutional change through accumulated ratchet effects rather than revolutionary transformation.

Parliamentary sovereignty requires more than Parliament claiming ultimate authority—it requires other institutions, particularly courts, accepting that claim. The evolution of judicial deference to parliamentary legislation represents a crucial but underexamined dimension of constitutional development. English courts did not always treat parliamentary statutes as unquestionable; the acceptance of legislative supremacy over judicial review emerged from specific institutional negotiations and strategic accommodations.

The medieval common law tradition contained resources for judicial independence that could have developed differently. Sir Edward Coke's dictum in Dr. Bonham's Case (1610)—that the common law could control Acts of Parliament and adjudge them void when they violated 'common right and reason'—suggested a trajectory toward judicial review. This potential path was foreclosed not by logical necessity but by institutional politics. Coke himself was dismissed from office; the common law courts aligned with Parliament against Crown prerogative during the constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century.

The alliance between Parliament and common law courts during the Stuart struggles shaped subsequent constitutional development profoundly. Courts that had positioned themselves as guardians of subject rights against royal prerogative found those claims absorbed into parliamentary authority. The Revolution Settlement established Parliament, not courts, as the institutional guarantor of English liberties. Judicial review of legislation became constitutionally inconceivable precisely because Parliament had become the constitutional protector.

By the eighteenth century, Blackstone could articulate parliamentary sovereignty as doctrine: Parliament's authority was 'transcendent and absolute,' and 'what the Parliament doth, no authority upon earth can undo.' This formulation reflected institutional reality. Courts interpreted statutes, applied precedent, and developed common law, but they did not question parliamentary enactments' validity. The allocation of authority between legislature and judiciary became embedded in professional legal culture and institutional practice.

The durability of judicial deference demonstrates how constitutional arrangements reproduce themselves through professional socialisation and institutional logic. Generations of lawyers and judges trained within a system of parliamentary sovereignty internalised its premises as foundational. The absence of constitutional text specifying judicial review made its assertion difficult; the presence of centuries of contrary practice made it unthinkable. Parliamentary sovereignty became a structural feature of English constitutionalism precisely because no institutional actor possessed both the authority and incentive to challenge it.

Takeaway

Courts accepted parliamentary supremacy not through logical necessity but through strategic alliance during seventeenth-century constitutional conflicts—an alignment that foreclosed the judicial review trajectory and embedded legislative supremacy in legal professional culture.

Parliamentary sovereignty's compatibility with an unwritten constitution represents a distinctive constitutional achievement whose logic deserves careful analysis. Written constitutions typically establish legislative authority while simultaneously constraining it through enumerated rights and structural provisions. The English arrangement achieved concentrated authority without codification, creating a constitutional order that could adapt to radically changed circumstances while maintaining institutional continuity.

The absence of a written constitution was not merely historical accident but reflected deliberate institutional choice at several crucial junctures. The Revolutionary Settlement could have produced a comprehensive constitutional document; the framers chose instead to enact specific statutes while leaving fundamental arrangements implicit. The preference for ambiguity over specification allowed constitutional development through reinterpretation and convention rather than formal amendment. What Parliament could not politically accomplish through explicit constitutional revision, it could achieve through ordinary legislation and accumulated practice.

Constitutional flexibility proved particularly valuable as circumstances transformed. The expansion of the franchise, the development of cabinet government, the integration of Scotland and Ireland, the acquisition and dissolution of empire, and the emergence of the welfare state—all occurred within a constitutional framework that never required fundamental reconstitution. Parliamentary sovereignty provided the legal mechanism; constitutional conventions provided the practical constraints. The combination achieved stability through adaptability.

The contrast with written constitutions illuminates what the English arrangement sacrificed and preserved. Written constitutions provide enhanced protection for individual rights against legislative majorities, formal procedures for constitutional change, and symbolic articulation of foundational principles. The English system traded these benefits for institutional flexibility, evolutionary development, and concentrated accountability. Neither arrangement is inherently superior; they represent different constitutional strategies with different consequences.

Contemporary challenges—European integration, devolution, human rights legislation—have tested parliamentary sovereignty's continued viability. The European Communities Act 1972 and the Human Rights Act 1998 created novel relationships between parliamentary legislation and external legal orders, prompting debate about sovereignty's meaning in changed circumstances. Yet the doctrine's institutional resilience is remarkable. Even profound constitutional developments have been accommodated within parliamentary sovereignty's conceptual framework, testament to the arrangement's extraordinary adaptive capacity.

Takeaway

Unwritten constitutionalism and parliamentary sovereignty proved mutually reinforcing—the absence of textual constraints enabled evolutionary adaptation while concentrated legislative authority provided the mechanism for continuous constitutional development.

Parliamentary sovereignty exemplifies how constitutional arrangements that appear natural and inevitable are actually historical constructions whose origins reveal their contingency. The English path to legislative supremacy required specific sequences of fiscal bargaining, strategic alliances between courts and Parliament, and deliberate choices favouring flexibility over codification. Different decisions at crucial junctures would have produced fundamentally different constitutional architectures.

For institutional scholars, parliamentary sovereignty offers a case study in how arrangements become entrenched through accumulated precedent, professional socialisation, and the foreclosure of alternative paths. The doctrine's stability derives not from its logical necessity but from the institutional ecology that reproduces and reinforces it. Understanding this ecology clarifies both the doctrine's durability and its vulnerability to changed circumstances.

Contemporary constitutional debates—about judicial review, European legal integration, devolution—are ultimately debates about whether the institutional conditions that sustained parliamentary sovereignty continue to obtain. The history traced here suggests that parliamentary sovereignty persists not as eternal truth but as a continuously reconstructed institutional achievement, dependent on conditions that can change.