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Dicey, Albert Venn (1835–1922)

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-T030-1
DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-T030-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/dicey-albert-venn-1835-1922/v-1

Article Summary

A.V. Dicey, who held the Vinerian Chair of English Law at Oxford University between 1882 and 1909, is widely regarded as the high priest of orthodox constitutional thought in Britain. Living through a period of great political and economic change, Dicey recognized that the duty of the constitutional lawyer could no longer be one of simply venerating Britain’s ancestral, unwritten constitution. He appreciated the need to try to lay bare its legal foundations and to identify its fundamental principles. In embarking on this exercise, Dicey, a follower of John Austin, employed an analytical method which treated law as a datum to be analysed and classified and which served to furnish a descriptive account of how law’s various divisions fit together to provide an ordered whole. Dicey was the first to apply this legal positivist method to the study of constitutional law in Britain. The method became so ensconced in legal thought in twentieth-century Britain that today lawyers scarcely acknowledge any work in constitutional law which predates Dicey’s work. It is as though he invented the subject.

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Citing this article:
Loughlin, Martin. Dicey, Albert Venn (1835–1922), 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-T030-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/dicey-albert-venn-1835-1922/v-1.
Copyright © 1998-2024 Routledge.

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