Albert Venn Dicey, born in 1835, was an English academic lawyer.
He studied jurisprudence at Balliol College, Oxford, and took up a
fellowship there after graduating. IN 1882, he was made Vinerian
Professor of English law at the university, having largely taught
and researched in tort and developing public law (since the
Vinerian professorship was, at the time, the only common-law chair
at Oxford, Dicey would have been responsible for all those areas
which were not Roman or canon law, e.g. land, contract, equity).
Three years later, in 1885, Dicey published a book that law
students still refer to: An Introduction to the Study of the Law of
the Constitution, which is one of the most important classic
accounts of English law. Not only does it conceptualise the ideas
of the sovereignty of Parliament (or, in Dicey's words:
"Parliament, in the mouth of a lawyer, means the Queen, the House
of Lords and the House of Commons... Parliament may make any law
whatsoever, and no body or institution is recoginsed by the law of
England has having a right to set aside or override the legislation
of Parliament") and the rule of law, but he also made
constitutional law an academically taught subject. His views on
parliamentary sovereignty generally hold sway still today (although
in light of Britain's accession to the EEC/EU, of the Human Rights
Act 1998 and of Thoburn v Sunderland City Council 2002, where Laws
LJ held that implied repeal of so-called 'constitutional statutes'
was precluded, this must be heavily qualified), but his idea of the
rule of law is generally seen as inadequate nowadays. However, it
was cited in as recent a case as Pierson in 1998. Dicey, though a
libertarian monarchist, never found favour with governments. He
because exceedingly political (his Law of the Constitution was
already quite polemical and nationalist in tone), loudly
campaigning against home rule for Ireland. Unusually for a former
Vinerian Professor, Dicey was never offered a knighthood. Dicey
left Oxford in the early 20th century to take up a professorial
post at the newly-founded London School of Economics and Political
Science. He died in 1922.