Introduction

For all practical purposes, the sources of English law are the common law, statute law and delegated legislation, and European Union law. We will discuss each of these in turn, but before we do so it is worth commenting that the omission of the European Convention on Human Rights from the sources of English law is intentional.

However, it would be seriously misleading to suggest that the Convention is unimportant in English law, because in addition to the duty which it imposes on public bodies (and which we have just noted), the Human Rights Act 1998 requires all courts to:

have regard to the law of the Convention in all cases involving ‘Convention rights’, and

to interpret all English legislation in such a way as to give effect to ‘Convention rights’ wherever it is possible to do so, even if the legislation in question pre-dates the Act itself.

We will return to the Convention and the Human Rights Act in more detail in Chapter 5, but it is never too early to understand that, in many situations, you will have to consider three legal systems (namely domestic English law, European Union law, and the law of the European Convention on Human Rights), and the ways in which they interact with each other, if you are going to have a proper understanding of the law as it is administered by the English courts.