This engaging book provides a clear and comprehensive account of the legal system of Northern Ireland.For many years it has been a go-to source for students and practitioners of law, yet is also accessible to readers with no prior legal knowledge.The book begins by explaining how Northern Ireland became a separate legal jurisdiction, what its current constitutional arrangements are, how its legislation is made and what kind of courts and judges it has. It t...

This book provides a detailed account of each law officer's functions and draws on that account as the basis for a conceptual analysis of their constitutional legitimacy.In recent years, the constitutional legitimacy of law officers has been questioned repeatedly because of recurring controversies surrounding the discharge of their varied functions. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that those functions enable law officers to play a highly influential part in the regulation ...

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland has functioned without interruption for over a century, yet its intermediate position can obscure the importance of its judgments.This book demonstrates the Court of Appeal’s pivotal role in securing justice, both by correcting lower court decisions and by developing the common law. It examines, in particular, how the Court has applied and developed the rule of law in a post-co...

A collection of some of the best papers presented at the 25th British Legal History Conference at Queen's University Belfast in July 2022, Law and Constitutional Change examines the role that law plays when countries experience a major constitutional upheaval. It examines the interaction of law and politics in history across different legal jurisdictions with different legal traditions. The theme of the conference was 'Law and Constitutional Change' and was inspired by the decade of annive...

This collection of essays is a tribute to Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore, who died aged 72 on 1 December 2020 after having retired from the UK Supreme Court just two months earlier.Brian Kerr was appointed as a judge of the High Court of Northern Ireland in 1993. He became the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland in 2004 before being elevated to a peerage and appointed as the last Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in June 2009. Four months later, as Lord Kerr, he moved from the Appellate Commi...