| English constitutional law attributes sovereignty to King-in-Parliament. The sovereign legal personality of the state is the personality of the king as head of parliament. Today, the king's personality as head of parliament is an artificial personality created and defined by law, a corporate or politic personality, ascribed to him as head of a corporation or body politic, parliament.; In the Middle Ages, the king had a natural, not an artificial, personality. Parliament was more nearly the king's court than a public, corporate assembly. Authority to govern belonged to the king alone, as a natural, not as a legal, person.; In the Tudor period, the king's personality was, by lawyers, divided into a natural and a politic personality, corresponding, respectively, to his natural capacity as a man and to his politic capacity as head of a corporation. Parliament came to be thought of as corporation as well as court, as "the body politic of the kingdom."; These sixteenth-century developments in English constitutional thinking, which underlay the emergence of the modern idea of the sovereignty of King-in-Parliament, rested upon corporate concepts elaborated in common law in the late Middle Ages.; The common law concepts of corporation and corporate capacity (or body politic and politic capacity) are analyzed, as they stood at the beginning of the Tudor period, through an examination of reported common law cases.; There follows a survey, based on the law reports, statutes, parliamentary proceedings and legal treatises of the sixteenth century, of the application of these corporate concepts to parliament, act of parliament, king, crown and realm.; The attempt is made to exhibit the transition from medieval constitutional thought, which ascribed governmental authority to the natural person of the king, to modern constitutional thought, which ascribes governmental authority to the whole realm in its corporate form, that is, to King-in-Parliament.; It is suggested that the idea of human "policy"--of deliberate human design and institution--underlay the concept of the body politic of the kingdom and of the politic capacity of its head; and that this idea of "policy" is an important source of modern English constitutionalism. |
