Outlines of constitutional law

(AFTER CHALMERS AND ASQUITH’S)

Ø 1) Look through the text and make a supposition which category of readers it will be interesting for. Prove your supposition.

Ø 2) Read the text and find the sentences which explain the following:

a) “unwritten Constitution”;

b) “flexible” Constitution;

c) theory and practice concerning English constitutional law are divergent;

d) differences between the English and American Constitutions.

To understand English constitutional law it is necessary to study numerous documents, including constitutional treaties like the Bill of Rights, various statutes and judicial decisions and others. But the whole of the Constitution of Britain will not be found in any of these documents. The English Constitution, though partly written, is yet to be regarded as “unwritten” from the standpoint of constitutional lawyers, as it is not codified as a whole in any particular document or documents. The English Constitution is considered to be flexible because Parliament can “make or unmake” any law by the same procedure and with the same ease.

The Constitution is not the source of the law, but the law gives birth to the Constitution.

Though the King (Queen) is the nominal Sovereign, any particular Parliament during the period of its existence is legally supreme.

In England the rights of the subject are mostly deduced from actual decisions in which remedies have been afforded for their invasion. Thus it is sometimes said that under the English Constitution the remedy precedes the right.

In administering justice the Judges enjoy little arbitrary power. The law which they administer is defined by statutes and other documents having statutory validity, and by judicial precedents.

England is the only country possessing hereditary legislators.

Theory and practice concerning English constitutional law are divergent, as it is seen from the following illustrations:

· In theory the Sovereign is to be an active party to the making of laws, but in practice he has a shadowy veto.

· In theory every Lord of Parliament is a Judge of the House of Lords, entitled to take part in appeals from the lower Courts; in practice he always absents himself unless qualified by statute to sit there as one of the quorum.”

· In theory certain persons (e.g. Lord Moor) are invested with judicial powers at trials in the Central Criminal Court, but in practice they don’t take part in judicial work there.

· In theory certain public departments are supposed to be controlled by boards consisting of various high officials (e.g. the Board of Trade), but the real head is a single Minister of the Crown (e.g. the President of the Board of Trade).

· Finally, Legislature and Executive are joined together by a connecting chain – the Cabinet.

Certain important Conventions control the entire working of the Constitution. These Conventions relate to the duties of the King as a person, the duties of the Ministers of the Crown and so on.

Differences between the English and American Constitutions:

· In America the President is in practice more of a ruler than the English King; but his legal powers are more restricted.

· The President can veto legislation, and the English King has legally an absolute but in practice a very shadowy power of veto which has not been exercised since long times.

· The English Constitution is flexible, the American – rigid, i.e. in England all laws can be altered with ease, and in America complicated machinery is necessary for the alteration of the Constitution.

· The American Constitution is written; the English Constitution is unwritten.

· The English Crown is inherited; the American President is elected for a term.

· The American President is not dependent on the vote of the Congress; in England the Cabinet is dependent on the vote of the House of Commons. In America, therefore, the Executive is not responsible to the Legislature.

Ø 3) Say what aspects are covered as “differences” between the English and American Constitutions.

 

Ø 4) Find professionally-relevant terms in the text. Define them.

 

Employment law in england

Ø 1) Read the text and translate it into Russian.

 

Employment Lawis the branch of the legal profession that deals with employment related issues. Employment Law exists in many countries, including the USA and England.

English Employment Law has developed rapidly over the past forty years, largely due to a historically strong UK Union movement. In its current form, it is largely a creature of Statute, (Acts of the UK Parliament) rather than Common Law. Leading Employment Law Statutes include the Employment Rights Act 1996, the Employment Act 2002 and various Acts outlawing discrimination. Unusually for UK legislation, the operation of the Employment Law system is broadly similar across the whole of the UK. After the employer’s own processes, such as disciplinary hearings and internal appeals, have been exhausted, employment law cases usually start by one party to a dispute presenting a complaint to an Employment Tribunal. These (as Industrial Tribunals) were set up under the 1964 Industrial Training Act, although they now have a substantially greater role and do count as courts. They have sometimes been referred to as industrial juries.

Generally speaking a tribunal will hear specific complaints about an aggrieved party being deprived of their rights, including (but not limited to) unfair dismissal. The tribunal will decide whether the responding party acted in a way that would be generally and typically seen as reasonable. Notice this is different from any opinion the tribunal itself might have about the reasonableness of any complained-of action.

Appeals from an Employment Tribunal can be made to an Employment Appeals Tribunal on one of three grounds: 1) an error in law, 2) a finding of fact not supported by evidence, or 3) a finding of perversity. An Employment Appeals Tribunal decision can be appealed to the Court of Appeal, and after that (very rarely) to the House of Lords.

 

Ø 2) The text contains a number of documents related to employment issues. How many can you find?

Ø 3) What are the stages for labour issues appellation in Great Britain?

Employment

Ø 1) Read the text.

Work is an essential economic activity. Like people all over the world, some Britons are hard working and some are not, but they are afraid of finding themselves out of a job and not just for financial reasons. Some really enjoy hard work; they are committed “workaholics.” The rest do the work and escape when they can, and try to get as many ad­vantages out of the system as they can.

Most of the working population in Britain (about 90 per cent) is employees who work for wages which they get either weekly or monthly. Another 6 per cent are the self-em­ployed, working on their own and paying themselves from the profits of their businesses. However, it is not simply true that the 3% of employers employ all the employees. About a third of the working population works for the State. And many of the biggest “employers” in Britain are not individuals, but trusts, or financial organisations representing hun­dreds of thousands of shareholders. The big businesses are managed; it is in the interests of managers to make profits. Part of them will go back into the business in the hope that it will become even more profitable, and the rest will go to the shareholders. The management will be among the shareholders. Employees have different interests. They want more wages, easier working condi­tions, and as many benefits as they can get out of the system. If the business fails to make profits, the employees will not get their pay; if the conditions of work of the employees are unsatisfactory, they will not work well enough to produce profits.

State employees are in a different position. They include national and local administration; almost all school teachers, doctors and medical staff, many research workers, the police, and all the service personnel. Their wages come from taxation, both from individuals and businesses, and from taxation on goods and services. So it is in the interests of these employees that the State should raise plenty of money. But employees (working both in the private and the state sector of the economy) are taxpayers, whose interest, naturally, is to pay as little tax as possible. They are also consumers of state services, like health and education, which are funded from public net.All these conflicts of interest mean that no part of the economy and no services implied by the society for its members can operate independently. In the middle stands: a citizen, who, like any human being anywhere, wants food, housing, education, medi­cal care, and then opportunities to move about, to enjoy himself, to make his home comfortable and to make his future secure for his children.

Employmentis a contract between two parties, one being the employerand the other being the employee. In a commercial setting, the employer conceives of a productive activity, generally with the intention of creating profits, and the employee contributes labor to the enterprise, usually in return for payment of wages.

To the extent that employment or the economic equivalent is not universal, unemployment exists.

Some people consider the employment system to be unfair given that the people who contribute the majority of work to an organisation do not receive a proportionate share of the profit. However, the surrealist movement is one of the few groups to actually opposework, and during the partially surrealist-influenced events of May 1968 the walls of the Sorbonne were covered with anti-work graffiti.

Laborers often talk of “getting a job,” or “having a job.” This conceptual metaphor of a “job” as a possession has led to its use in slogans such as “money for jobs, not bombs.” Similar conceptions are that of “land” as a possession (real estate) or intellectual rights as a possession (intellectual property).

An employer is a person or institution that hires employees or workers. Employers offer wages to the workers in exchange for the worker’s labour-power. Employers include everybody from individuals hiring a babysitter to governments and businesses which hire many thousands of employees. In most western societies governments are the largest single employers, but most of the work force is employed in small and medium businesses in the private sector. Note that although employees may contribute to the evolution of an enterprise, the employer maintains autonomous control over the productive infrastructure of land and capital, and is the entity named in contracts. The employer typically also maintains ownership of intellectual property created by an employee within the scope of employment and as a function thereof. These are known as “works for hire.” Within large organisations the management of employees is often handled by Human Resources or Personnel departments.

An employee is any person hired by an employer - typically, a worker hired to perform a specific “job”. Typical examples include accountants, solicitors, lawyers, photographers, among many other worker classifications. There are different classes of employees. Some are permanent and provide a guaranteed salary; other employers hire workers on short term contracts or rely on consultants. The employee contributes labor and expertise to an enterprise. Employees perform the discrete activity of economic production. Of the three factors of production, employees usually provide the labor. Some companies feel that a happier work force is a better one and thus offer extra benefits to improve morale and performance.

However, other employers try to increase profits by providing low wages and few benefits. To resist this, employees can organise into labor unions (American English), or trade unions (British English), that represent most of the available work force and must therefore be listened to by the management. This is the source of considerable bad feeling between the two sides, and sometimes even violence.

An individual who entirely owns the business for which he labors is known as self-employed, although if a self-employed individual has only one client for whom he performs work, he may be considered an employee of that client for tax purposes. Workers who are not paid wages, such as volunteers, are generally not considered as being employed. Someone who works under a threat of physical force is known as a slave and slave-owners are also not considered employers. Some historians suggest that slavery is older than employment, but both arrangements have existed for all recorded history.

 

Ø 2) Answer the questions to the text:

a) How can you characterise the attitude of Britons to work?

b) What do we call people who enjoy work and are committed to it?

c) Are you a workaholic?

d) How many people work in the state sector?

e) Who are the biggest employers in Britain?

f) Whom do trusts represent?

g) What do employees want to get out of the system?

h) Whom do we call “state employees”?

 

Ø 3) The following phrases appear in this text. Find them and note their meanings: out of a job; the profits of the businesses; raise plenty of money; shareholders; consumers of state services; taxpayers; public net; in a commercial setting; a proportionate share of the profit; real estate; the private sector; ownership of intellectual property; the available work force; a self-employed individual; under a threat of physical force.

 

Ø 4) Find the words/word combinations which have the opposite meaning to the given ones from the text: ad­vantages; different; hard working; to hire; to improve; to include; permanent; profitable; to resist; to secure; slavery; unemployment.

Ø 5) Write a summary of the text.