Miller and Devolution: How Wales Approached the Issues

It was billed as themost important constitutional case for decades. The central question could hardly be starker – could the Government trigger Brexit merely by using the prerogative and so bypass the need for legislation? Yet, when it came to it, the conjoined challenges brought by Gina Miller, Dos Santos and the Northern Ireland references (collectively `Miller' ) were decided by amajority of the UK Supreme Court (`the Court') on a very narrow basis. The focus of the Court's majority decision lay on the, somemight say oxymoronic, twin-propositions that EU law was a source of UK domestic law, whilst at the same time holding that our basic rules of recognition had not changed. It was, in that fashion, possible for the Court to determine that a statute was necessary to remove EU law as a continuing source of law, just as a statute, the European Communities Act 1972 (`the ECA 1972'), had been needed to create it in the first place.