Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
This event was organised by the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.
Speaker: Dr Leah Trueblood (University of Surrey)
Respondents: Prof Jeff King (UCL Laws), Prof Richard Bellamy (UCL Laws)
Chair: Prof Erin Delaney (UCL Laws)
About the seminar
Is democracy merely performing throat-clearing work in UK common law reasoning? This article tracks how the UK Supreme Court has invoked democracy in its common law judgments over its first fifteen years and argues that the answer is ‘no.’ The paper identifies three main kinds of legal work that democracy performs: shaping the content of common law rights, guiding statutory interpretation, and clarifying the Court’s own constitutional role. There is, however, one part of the UKSC’s approach to democracy that is untenable: the Court grounds the right to vote in statute rather than the common law. The article argues that grounding the right to vote in statute is both an indefensible account of the law itself, and cannot be reconciled with the UKSC’s broader common law conceptions of democracy.
This seminar was part of the Public Law Seminar Series.
This event was organised by the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.
Speaker: Dr Leah Trueblood (University of Surrey)
Respondents: Prof Jeff King (UCL Laws), Prof Richard Bellamy (UCL Laws)
Chair: Prof Erin Delaney (UCL Laws)
About the seminar
Is democracy merely performing throat-clearing work in UK common law reasoning? This article tracks how the UK Supreme Court has invoked democracy in its common law judgments over its first fifteen years and argues that the answer is ‘no.’ The paper identifies three main kinds of legal work that democracy performs: shaping the content of common law rights, guiding statutory interpretation, and clarifying the Court’s own constitutional role. There is, however, one part of the UKSC’s approach to democracy that is untenable: the Court grounds the right to vote in statute rather than the common law. The article argues that grounding the right to vote in statute is both an indefensible account of the law itself, and cannot be reconciled with the UKSC’s broader common law conceptions of democracy.
This seminar was part of the Public Law Seminar Series.
