James Bryce and Parliamentary Sovereignty

This article considers the important but neglected contribution of James Bryce (1838–1922)—noted historian, Gladstonian statesman, and ambassador to the US—to the constitutional debates over Home Rule for Ireland in late Victorian Britain. It focuses on Bryce's reflections on the nature of sovereignty and constitutional government provoked by the need to reconcile Home Rule with parliamentary sovereignty, recently canonized by Bryce's Unionist counterpart and friend, A. V. Dicey. Challenging a tradition of scholarship that sees the Home Rule debates as “a sideshow” and Bryce's contribution as “illogical,” I suggest that Bryce's contribution in fact represents an innovative imperial constitutionalism of what may be called “soft” federalism, which rests not on a codified constitution enforced by courts but on a paradoxical understanding of Parliament's de facto sovereignty as constrained by moral commitments. In this light, the jurisprudential debates appear less a sideshow than an important part of the political contest itself.