A Twenty-First Century Constitution for the UK

In this lecture, Frank Vibert (Senior Visiting Fellow at LSE Department of Government) will set out the case of his forthcoming book, Making a 21st Century Constitution: that constitutions no longer provide the kind of support needed by democracies confronted by the complex social and political conditions of the modern day.

He will apply his principles for twenty-first century constitution-making to the UK, in order to consider how a fully written UK constitution might best be framed. In doing so, he will offer a more radical and extensive set of proposals to those outlined in a 2017 lecture by A.C. Grayling, who spoke in favour of a written constitution to address particular problems such as the codification of more stringent rules for referendums.

Making a 21st Century Constitution will be published by Edward Elgar in 2018.

Frank Vibert is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Department of Government at the London School of Economics, and a former Senior Fellow of UNU/WIDER and Senior Advisor at the World Bank. He has written a number of books on constitutional and regulatory topics including Democracy and Dissent: The Challenge of International Rule Making (Edward Elgar, 2011); Europe Simple, Europe Strong: The Future of European Governance (Polity, 2001); and The Rise of the Unelected: Democracy and the New Separation of Powers (Cambridge University Press, 2007).