BOOK REVIEW: Donal K. COFFEY on Brexit, union, and disunion: the evolution of British constitutional unsettlement by Sionaidh Douglas-Scott (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 362-366)

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Brexit blew up the United Kingdom’s constitutional settlement. When the UK voted to leave the European Union, it threw into sharp relief a series of delicate constitutional arrangements that governed the relationship of the Government to Parliament through prorogation, the integration of direct democracy into a system ostensibly founded on representative democracy, the balance of power between Westminster and the devolved regions, the rights that citizens held in the UK – and that is merely to scratch the surface. In the current volume, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott takes the crisis offered by Brexit to provide an overview of the British constitutional settlement across a number of different axes. The monograph as a whole is an entertaining scholarly tour de force which demonstrates the application of a wide range of methodologies in a sophisticated fashion.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History.

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580105