Parliamentary sovereignaty and the Commonwealth.

It would be interesting to know what precise accidents or experiences provoke the writing of books and the choice of
topics for academic study. Often the student himself cannot say. I suspect that the origin of a long-standing fascination by
the idea of sovereignty might, in the present case, be traced to a first undergraduate reading of the passage in which Sir Ivor
Jennings explains that De Lolme was mistaken in thinking that Parliament could do anything except make a man into a woman
and a woman into a man; since if Parliament enacted that all men should be women, they would be women as far as the law
is concerned. The intellectual neatness of this arrangement impressed and convinced me at the time, but I have wondered
ever since why there is (so far as I know) no full-length study of so curious a constitutional principle.
The present work can hardly make any such pretension. It is rather an attempt to look at some of the traditional implications of the sovereignty doctrine in the light of certain ideas about the function and description oflegal rules in theoretical writing about law, and also of recent constitutional developments outside the United Kingdom