Mirror Principle

The mirror crack’d from side to side: Dalton’s application for judicial review [2023] UKSC 36

5 January 2024 by anuragdeb

In Lord Tennyson’s Arthurian ballad ‘The Lady of Shalott’, the eponymous heroine is stranded in her island castle. Continually weaving a web in her loom of the reflections of the outside world she sees in her mirror, she knows she will be cursed if she stops and looks out to nearby Camelot. But one day, Sir Lancelot rides by her castle and she abandons her loom and looks outside. Her mirror cracks “from side to side” and she is cursed. She leaves her castle and floats down to Camelot in a boat, dying before she reaches it.

Victorian poetry scholar Erik Gray analyses the Lady of Shalott as Tennyson’s exploration of the role of an artist: knowing what is better (staying inside and looking at reflections of the real world) and choosing to do what is worse (going outside into the real world). Just as the Lady of Shalott’s mirror cracked, the Supreme Court in Dalton’s application for judicial review marked possibly one of the largest cracks yet in the mirror principle: that the rights provided under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) should mirror those under the ECHR. But this analogy with the Lady of Shalott raises two important questions: was the jurisprudence flowing from the mirror principle better and is the turn away from it worse?

At the outset, I acknowledge my involvement in the Dalton litigation. This post is not an exploration of that litigation. Instead, I look at the possible impact of the Supreme Court’s judgment on the mirror principle and what it may tell us more broadly about the HRA.