SQE1 Legal System and Constitutional Law: A Plain-English Overview

Two of the seven FLK1 subjects get less attention than Contract or Tort, and are usually the ones candidates revise last: the Legal System of England and Wales, and Constitutional and Administrative Law. Both are foundational rather than dramatic, which is precisely why they reward precision.

Legal System of England and Wales

This subject asks a narrower question than it sounds like it should: not “what is the law”, but “how does the machinery that produces and applies the law actually work”. Three areas carry most of the weight.

Court structure and appeal routes. Civil and criminal cases move through different hierarchies, and questions are usually built around a specific fact pattern: which court hears a case first, and where an appeal from that decision goes. Getting the direction of an appeal right, and knowing which decisions bind which courts, matters more than being able to recite the hierarchy diagram from memory.

The doctrine of precedent. A lower court is bound by the ratio decidendi of a higher court’s decision in the same hierarchy. The interesting exam territory is in the exceptions: when the Court of Appeal can depart from its own earlier decisions, for instance, following the well-established exceptions set out in Young v Bristol Aeroplane Co Ltd [1944] KB 718, or when the Supreme Court exercises its own, narrower power to depart from precedent.

Statutory interpretation. The literal, golden and mischief approaches are usually tested by giving you a short piece of legislation and asking which interpretive approach a court is applying to reach a particular result, rather than asking you to define the three approaches directly.

Constitutional and Administrative Law

This subject covers the architecture around the state: parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and, in practice, the area tested most often: judicial review.

Judicial review grounds. Almost every scenario question in this subject reduces to the same task: read a short fact pattern about a public body’s decision, and work out which of the three classic grounds of judicial review applies. Illegality covers a decision-maker acting outside their power, or failing to take account of something Parliament clearly intended to be relevant. Irrationality, the Wednesbury unreasonableness standard, covers a decision so unreasonable that no sensible decision-maker could have reached it. Procedural impropriety covers unfairness in how a decision was reached, rather than what was decided. The leading case for the three-ground framework itself is Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service [1985] AC 374, generally known as the GCHQ case.

Parliamentary sovereignty. Candidates often over-complicate this. The core proposition, that Parliament can make or unmake any law and no other body can override an Act of Parliament, is stable and well established. The harder exam territory is in how it interacts with retained EU law and devolution, which is worth checking against the current SRA specification rather than an older textbook, since this is one of the areas most likely to have moved on.

Why these subjects are worth your revision time

Neither subject is glamorous, and neither produces the kind of forum discussion that Contract or Land Law does. That is exactly why they are comparatively under-served by free content online, and exactly why a candidate who revises them properly, rather than skimming them the week before the exam, picks up marks that others leave behind.

Our course covers both subjects in full, including a cited revision mind-map and a complete question bank for each. A free account unlocks the first section of both.