John Laws (judge)

Infobox Politician
honorific-prefix = The Right Honourable

name = Sir John Laws,
Lord Justice Laws
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Sir John Grant McKenzie Laws (born 10 May 1945), styled The Rt Hon. Lord Justice Laws, has been a Lord Justice of Appeal since 1999, at which time he was also, as is customary for Lords Justices of Appeal, sworn of the Privy Council.

Educated at Durham School and Exeter College, Oxford, he was First Junior Treasury Counsel (Common Law) and then since 1992 a Judge of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, Queen's Bench Division.

Sir John Laws is notable for his extra-judicial writings in the law journal Public Law. His most notable contribution, "Law and Democracy", asserts that the constitution would be undemocratic if it gave all the power under it to the elected government. Therefore it is the constitution, and not Parliament, that should be sovereign in the British constitution. He posits that the constitution must create a "higher-order law" in which human rights and constitutional fundamentals in a democracy can be protected by the courts against the abuses of government. This position stems from a fundamental distrust of the political constitution in holding the executive to account. It is similar in form to Lord Hailsham's claim that in Britain there is an "elective dictatorship" (see "The Dilemma of Democracy"). Sir John does not see this shift to the legal sphere as being anti-democratic because judges uphold apolitical values that no politician would contest and are above the arguments that take place in the political sphere between politicians of political parties.

These statements are certainly controversial and have been fiercely rebutted by academics such as John Griffith and Martin Loughlin, both professors at the London School of Economics. The essential arguments made by these authors are to the effect that the metaphysical principles that Sir John cites are highly contentious. A good example of this is Laws' love of freedom of expression. When is it right for racist or sexist comments to be illegal? Whilst for Griffith it should be up to a democratically elected legislature to decide such tricky moral issues, for Laws it is firmly a matter of law for the judges to decide. The problem with the latter approach, according to Griffith, stems from the fact that judges cannot be removed if the decisions they make are judged to be wrong by citizens of a polity. For Laws on the other hand, such counter-majoritarianism is a beneficial aspect of the law, which acts to protect those that are vulnerable in society against the tyranny of the majority.

Cases Presided Over

Thoburn v Sunderland City Council - Perhaps Sir Johns' most famous decision, and extremely controversial in the public law sphere. In it he recognises principles in common law contrary to parliamentary supremacy.

R v Somerset County Council, ex parte Fewings-- Sir John sat in the first instance hearing of this historic case, concerning the legality of a decision made to prohibit hunting on a small area of land, which the Council had acquired, and was argued to maintain under s120(1(b) Local Government Act 1972.