North American Vikings
28 Oct 2021 Leave a comment
I was just writing the other day about the 1339 monk who wrote about the discovery of America. Now, analysis of wood from timber-framed buildings in the L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland shows a Norse-built settlement over 1,000 years ago – 471 years before Columbus.
As the Guardian and Science News report, the Icelandic sagas – oral histories written down hundreds of years later – tell of a leader named Leif Erikson. The recent finding corroborates two Icelandic sagas – the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red – that recorded attempts to establish a settlement in Vinland. Also known as Leif the Lucky, he was the son of Erik the Red, who was the founder of the first Norse settlements in Greenland. According to the Saga of the Icelanders, Leif established a Norse settlement at Vinland, which is usually interpreted as being coastal…
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Michael Foran: Parliamentary Sovereignty and the Politics of Law-making
19 Oct 2021 Leave a comment
Parliamentary sovereignty has traditionally been understood to mean that Parliament is free to enact legislation on any area of law that it chooses, and that Acts of the U.K. Parliament take precedence over subordinate legislation, regulation, or common law rule. Understood this way, parliamentary sovereignty is a constitutional principle that is couched explicitly in legal terms: it is a legal principle with legal effect, speaking to other legal entities within our constitutional order regarding how they are to exercise their legal functions in light of legislation passed by Parliament. In essence, it is a doctrine of legislative supremacy which honours Parliament’s constitutional role by according its enactments their due authority. On this view, no discernible distinction exists between parliamentary sovereignty and Parliament’s law-making powers because sovereignty describes the scope and weight of those very powers.
A central feature of the political aspect of our constitution is that the other elements…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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