English Law - England and Wales As A Distinct Jurisdiction

England and Wales As A Distinct Jurisdiction

The United Kingdom is a state consisting of several legal jurisdictions: (a) England and Wales, (b) Scotland and (c) Northern Ireland. The formerly separate jurisdiction of Wales was absorbed into the Kingdom of England by King Henry VIII, a member of the Tudor dynasty. By the Act of Union, 1707, Scotland retained an independent church and judiciary. Ireland lost its independent Parliament later than Scotland, but its established Anglican church (the Church of Ireland) was historically an archbishopric of the Church of England headed by the King or Queen and deferring to the Archbishop of Canterbury; for the most part the legal system is separate from that of England and Wales. The legal system of Ireland is completely separate from that of the U.K. now, but that of Northern Ireland retains some links from the Imperial past, inasmuch as it is based on the medieval English common law system, there are many English statutes from the time of Poynings' Law on that apply in Northern Ireland and there is an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from the Court of Appeal of Northern Ireland.

"The civilized portion of the earth is divided up into certain units of territory in each of which a particular law proper to that territory alone prevails, and that territory is for legal purposes a unit."

"§ 2.2. What Determines the State. — It has been seen that the existence of separate legal units within the dominions of a single sovereign is a fact, the result of historical accidents... when Hawaii was annexed to the United States it remained a separate legal unit.

Statehood is also defined in public international law by the Montevideo Convention, which refers to the following criteria as necessary to establish true statehood: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

Some jurisdictions such as Australia use the term "law unit" and some authors use the word "country", believing that these words are less confusing than the use of the word "state". The majority view is that "state" is the best term. Hence, for Conflict purposes, England and Wales constitute a single state.

This is important for a number of reasons, one of the more significant being the distinction between nationality and domicile. Thus, an individual would have a British nationality and a domicile in one of the constituent states, the latter law defining all aspects of a person's status and capacity. Dicey and Morris (p26) list the separate states in the British Islands. "England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark. . . is a separate country in the sense of the conflict of laws, though not one of them is a State known to public international law." But this may be varied by statute. The United Kingdom is one state for the purposes of the Bills of Exchange Act 1882. Great Britain was a single state for the purposes of the Companies Act 1985. Traditionally authors referred to the legal unit or state of England and Wales as England, although in recent decades this usage has increasingly become politically and culturally unacceptable.