A trichroic constitution
Much has changed since Dicey attributed a legal spirit to the institutions of the English constitution because they were commonly looked upon from a legal point of view, and contrasted it with the civil administrative spirit of French constitutionalism and the military spirit of Prussian constitutionalism.
From a historical perspective on changes of the last century, coming into common view has been a complex trichroic constitution—legal, developing further in a civil administrative direction, both internally and under French influence, and showing lasting military manifestations in response to the extraordinary necessities of world war. It has been the outcome of internal domestic development and European interaction, varying from influence and imitation to reaction and war.From a late-modern historical perspective, the trichroic constitution’s basic forms of accountability have not been dichotomous or trichotomous because they have not been mutually exclusive, but complementary and mutually interactive. Throughout the period with which this chapter is concerned, insistence upon legal accountability has been complemented with emphasis upon political or, more generally, civil administrative accountability, the importance and advantages of which Dicey himself for his part both recognized and emphasized, particularly in his treatment of conventions and the executive’s parliamentary character. Griffith and Street for their part, in their leading early-1950s administrative law textbook, treated accountability through political and other civil administrative controls of the administration as primary and treated legal accountability through the prerogative remedies and other judicial controls as secondary, but both nonetheless as clearly complementary. Through their treatment and the constitution’s various other institutional, legal remedial, and political constitutionalist shifts in a civil administrative direction, administrative law has been developed and complemented with emphasis on political accountability. The extent to which administrative legal accountability in the common law has been both necessarily affected by the extraordinary military necessities of world war and thus mistakenly distorted thereafter has been considerable. It deserves greater recognition and warrants further research.
From a strictly legal perspective, the military manifestations of the constitution’s trichroic spirit may remain difficult to discern in the continuity of the common law. If so, the legal spirit Dicey attributed to ‘a love for forms and precedents’ and ‘acquiescence in fictions’[234] within ‘the mystery and formalism of English constitutionalism’[235] would have lost its claim to exclusivity, but little of its significance.