Utopia, you are standing in it!

In my previous post, we took a look at the claim that trans people “have always been here” in the numbers at which they’re now emerging, and found it wanting.

Now, I’d like to turn our attention to the fact that the trans rights movement has clearly undergone significant changes in the last two decades.

Twenty years ago, trans people were not making the claim that they had “always been” their preferred sex. They knew biological sex existed, and the idea of a non-transitioned, non-passing trans person entering into opposite-sex spaces was absurd.

Today, things are very different. Online trans activists are brash and bold with their claims that biological sex doesn’t exist and neither should sex-based protections. They also seem to share a belief unique to transgender people that they must be recognized as their preferred sex in order to exist at all.

When women notice…

The Supreme Court issued its decision inH v Lord Advocate (pdf) in 2012. The decision has been virtually ignored by constitutional scholars, but we believe it may be of great constitutional significance. In this post we explain why, starting with some background about constitutional statutes.

Commentators have lately considered how constitutional statutes should be interpreted (for example Tarunabh Khaitanon this blog), and what exactly makes a statute ‘fundamental’ or ‘constitutional’ (for example David Feldman in the latest issue of LQR). A third issue, and our focus here, is how a constitutional statute can be repealed.

In the well-known 2002 case of Thoburn v Sutherland City Council, Laws LJ (with whom Crane J agreed) claimed that a constitutional statute is susceptible to implied repeal in a much narrower range of circumstances than an ordinary statute. At first Laws LJ put the point categorically: ‘Ordinary statutes may be impliedly…

The issue of select committee powers has received renewed interest during the 2010-15 Parliament, culminating in a report from Liaison Committee on Select committee effectiveness, resources and powers (in October 2012); and, subsequently, a report by the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege in July 2013 (and a Government response later that year).

Although parliamentary select committees are frequently described as being powerful and influential, questions have arisen about their ability both to summon witnesses and punish those who are guilty of contempt or perjury.

In relation to the latter issue, the Government’s Green Paper on Parliamentary Privilege (Cm 8318, 2012), which preceded the Joint Committee’s report, had noted that:

The Houses’ power to punish non-members for contempt is untested in recent times. In theory, both Houses can summon a person to the bar of the House to reprimand them or order a person’s imprisonment. In addition, the House of Lords…

I’ve just finished reading a book that’s closely connected with many of our interests: Greg Lukianoff and Jon Haidt’s new volume, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon site:

The issue is why so many students in American colleges and universities are behaving differently from in past years: they’re now ridden with anxiety and depression, demanding accommodation to their demands, protesting initiatives for free speech (or speakers they don’t like), constantly feeling “unsafe”, and making professors feel intimidated about speaking their minds. We know about these trends, but Lukianoff (head of FIRE, or the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and Haidt (a moral psychologist at NYU) document some of them with statistics.

Their worry is that students have absorbed what they call the Three Great Untruths, and these…