Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century

Introduction to the Liberty Fund Edition

Introduction to the Liberty Fund Edition “Law Ⳮ Opinion” is the best thing I have ever written Ⳮ much more mature than the “Law of the Constitution.”1 in the last decade of his life Albert Dicey repeatedly claimed that Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century was his “best” and most “mature” book.2 This was peculiar coming from the author of the famous and authoritative The Law of the Constitution. Why did he favor Law and Opinion? It was a mature work in several senses; the product of great age, of a long process, and of long-held beliefs. It articulated the beliefs and fears of a typical intelligent English Edwardian Benthamite Liberal responding to the apostasies of Gladstonian Liberals and to the socialism of J. S. Mill, Asquith’s Liberals, and the British Labour Party. Law and Opinion therefore also has an elegiac aspect: a mature writer facing the displacement of his cherished theories by irresponsible new experiments. Albert Venn Dicey (1835–1922) wrote Law and Opinion near the end of a long and productive life. In 1905 he was seventy, and by the time of the second edition, in 1914, he was seventy-nine. Dicey’s life spanned the Victorian era, and he knew personally many of the important Liberal thinkers in English politics and letters. Dicey came from a typical Liberal family. His father, Thomas Edward Dicey, was a Whig reformer and the editor of the family newspaper, the Northampton Mercury. His mother, Anne Mary 1. A. V. Dicey, Macmillan Papers, British Library, Add Mss 55085, July 1, 1912. 2. Ibid., see, for example, March 23, 1917, July 4, 1917, and August 27, 1920. xiv / Introduction Stephen, came from a leading Evangelical family.3 While Dicey was not particularly religious, in either a spiritual or a dogmatic sense, he embraced the humanitarian mission of the Evangelicals.4 Dicey noted that Benthamite Liberals and Evangelicals were the leading forces of reform in nineteenthcentury England. Both groups believed in the individual’s duty to promote reform (78).5 Dicey himself accepted these duties. Dicey’s experiences when he went to Oxford in 1854 reinforced these beliefs. He was one of a generation of earnest, hardworking young Liberals who excelled in their studies. They gravitated to John Stuart Mill’s writings. Mill’s Political Economy (several editions starting in 1848) and On Liberty (1859) dominated political discussion and, in Dicey’s view, promoted a rigorous Liberal Benthamism (361, 363, 130, 275). Some of the most talented joined the Old Mortality Society, an undergraduate discussion group Dicey helped found in 1856. These young men were interested in politics and reform, and many were influential in English politics and letters for the next half century.6 Dicey developed some of his most important friendships in this group, including with James Bryce, who was later a Liberal M.P., cabinet minister, ambassador to the United States, and author of The American Commonwealth. As Richard Cosgrove notes, Dicey’s basic beliefs were in place by the time he left Oxford in 1861, and to them he remained true.7 Dicey spent twenty years as a journalist, a practicing lawyer, and as a political hopeful. He contributed to Essays on Reform (1867), a prominent Liberal project.8 He also wrote several legal texts that helped gain for him in 1882 an appointment to the position of Vinerian Professor of English 3. Robert S. Rait, Memorials of Albert Venn Dicey (London: Macmillan, 1925), 11–13. Dicey was related to Leslie Stephen. 4. Richard Cosgrove, The Rule of Law: Albert Venn Dicey, Victorian Jurist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 6. In passing, Dicey mentioned original sin (393), but since he was not a particularly devout Christian, we are better off interpreting human nature in Benthamite terms—that is, that individuals universally pursued pleasure and sought to avoid pain. 5. Law and Opinion; page numbers cited within the text of this introduction refer to this volume. 6. Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism (London: Allen Lane, 1976), 13, 64–67. 7. Cosgrove, Rule of Law, 22. 8. Harvie, Lights of Liberalism, 131–32. Introduction / xv Law at Oxford. This chair had once been held by Sir William Blackstone, who features prominently in Law and Opinion. Dicey became famous as a legal scholar and for the book Introduction to the Study of the Law of...