Chris

The legislature as an institution sits above the courts in every sense, in the UK at least. Parliament is sovereign and all any British court can ever do is apply its will as expressed in statute. Even 100 years of case law (“precedent”) and the most ancient common law the courts have access to can be overwritten with a single Act of Parliament, if Parliament so wishes. That’s why appointing extra-parliamentary bodies to sit in judgment of MPs is controversial.

There is no real parallel between the US Supreme Court and any British institution. The US is founded on a written constitution which is given living expression by the panel of Supreme Court justices who are all appointed by presidents and therefore likely to have political inclinations one way or another. Any presidential order and any act of congress can be tested by the Supreme Court in order to determine if it’s constitutional. The Supreme Court is therefore that country’s final legal authority.

The UK Supreme Court is simply our final court of appeal, designed primarily to hear the most significant cases, in which actions with grave consequences are tested against the most thorough reading of our unwritten constitution. And the thing about our constitution is that it really is just an arcane tangle of statutes and precedents, that Parliament can overwrite (or further tangle) at any time. In fact a UK Supreme Court judgment could be entirely undone by a single act of Parliament, if Parliament so wished. The legislature in the US can’t easily unpick US Supreme Court judgments in that way.