SQE1 Constitutional Law and Retained EU Law: A Revision Guide

Almost everyone who sits FLK1 arrives with the same private assumption: Constitutional and Administrative Law will be the soft landing. It has no calculations, no Solicitors Accounts double-entry, no limitation periods to memorise. It is, people tell themselves, the essay subject — and single-best-answer questions can't really punish you on an essay subject.

Then the mock comes back and public law is sitting at 52%, well below Contract and Tort, and nobody can quite explain why.

The reason is not difficulty. It is precision. Public law questions in FLK1 tend to turn on a single narrow distinction — is this ground illegality or irrationality? Is the claimant challenging the decision or the policy? Does section 3 or section 4 of the Human Rights Act apply here? — and four of the five options will be perfectly respectable statements of law that simply answer a different question. You lose marks not because you don't know the material, but because you know it in a loose, seminar-discussion shape rather than an operational one.

What FLK1 actually examines in this subject

Constitutional and Administrative Law and EU law is one of seven functioning legal knowledge subjects in FLK1, alongside Business Law and Practice, Dispute Resolution, Contract, Tort, the Legal System of England and Wales, and Legal Services. FLK2 carries the other six — Property Practice, Wills and the Administration of Estates, Solicitors Accounts, Land Law, Trusts, and Criminal Law and Practice. Thirteen subjects across two assessments of 180 single-best-answer questions each, sat in two sessions of 2 hours 33 minutes on the assessment day.

Don't try to guess how many questions your subject will get.uk rather than relying on what a candidate told you last cycle. The specification is also the only place where the scope of "EU law" for FLK1 purposes is authoritatively defined, and that scope has moved since 2016.

Broadly, the territory splits into four blocks:

• Core constitutional principles — parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, separation of powers, the royal prerogative, and the relationship between the three branches. Conventions and their (non-)enforceability.
• Judicial review — who can bring it, against whom, when, on what grounds, and what the court can do about it. This is the largest practical block by some distance.
• The Human Rights Act 1998 — the mechanics of sections 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8, plus the structure of absolute, limited and qualified Convention rights, and proportionality.
• EU law and its afterlife — the institutions and sources, direct effect and supremacy as historical concepts, and the current domestic status of what used to be called retained EU law.

The trap in block one

Constitutional theory reads beautifully and examines terribly, because the SQE will not ask you to discuss parliamentary sovereignty. It will give you a scenario where a statute conflicts with a common law principle, or where a minister purports to use prerogative power in an area covered by legislation, and ask what a court would do. The correct answer is nearly always mechanical: statute prevails over prerogative in the same field, the courts will not question the internal proceedings of Parliament, but they will police whether a prerogative power exists and how far it extends. Entick v Carrington, the GCHQ case on justiciability, Miller on prerogative and statutory rights — these are worth knowing not as reading but as decision rules.

Judicial review is the engine room — treat it like a checklist subject

If you only drill one thing in this subject, drill judicial review. It has the highest question yield and it rewards a rigid, repeatable sequence. The mistake candidates make is jumping straight to grounds. The examiner's favourite trick is to hand you a scenario with a beautiful Wednesbury irrationality argument and a fatal preliminary problem — the body is not amenable to review, or the claim is out of time, or there is a suitable alternative remedy that has not been exhausted.

Work the sequence in this order, every time:

1. Is the decision reviewable? Public body or body exercising a public function; is the subject matter justiciable?
2. Does the claimant have standing? Sufficient interest under section 31 of the Senior Courts Act 1981 — remembering that campaigning groups can and do satisfy it.
3. Is it in time? Promptly and in any event within three months of the grounds arising, under CPR Part 54, with shorter periods in specific statutory contexts.
4. Has any alternative remedy been exhausted? A statutory appeal route usually kills a judicial review claim.
5. Which ground? Only now.
6. Which remedy? All discretionary. Quashing, prohibiting and mandatory orders, declarations, injunctions; damages only where there is a freestanding private law or HRA basis.

On grounds, the classification exercise is where the marks live. A rough working table that has served a lot of candidates well:

A worked example

A district council operates a licensing scheme for street food traders. Its published policy states that any trader who has held a licence for three consecutive years "will normally be granted a renewal, subject to compliance with hygiene conditions". A trader, Miriam, has held a licence for six years with an unblemished record. In March the council's licensing officer writes to her refusing renewal, stating only that "the committee has decided to reduce the number of pitches in the town centre". Miriam had, two months earlier, received a letter from the head of licensing confirming that "your pitch is secure for the coming season". She was given no opportunity to make representations. She receives the refusal on 14 March and instructs solicitors on 20 August.

Three grounds jump out — breach of legitimate expectation arising from the letter, procedural unfairness in the absence of any opportunity to be heard, and arguably a failure to give adequate reasons. In an MCQ, though, the best answer will very often be the one that identifies the delay. More than five months have elapsed; the claim is well outside the three-month longstop and there is no obvious explanation for it. A candidate who spots the legitimate expectation and stops reading picks a distractor that is legally sound but practically useless. That is precisely the shape of a well-drafted SQE1 item.

Public law questions are rarely testing whether you can find an argument. They are testing whether you can find the argument that actually decides the case — and whether you noticed the one thing that kills it.

The Human Rights Act layer

The HRA sits on top of everything and generates a disproportionate number of questions relative to how long it takes to learn. Five sections carry most of the load.

• Section 2 — domestic courts must take into account Strasbourg jurisprudence. Not bound by it. Candidates routinely pick the "bound by" distractor.
• Section 3 — legislation must be read compatibly with Convention rights so far as it is possible to do so. This is a strong interpretive obligation that can strain language, as Ghaidan v Godin-Mendoza demonstrates, but it cannot rewrite a provision against the grain of the statute.
• Section 4 — where compatible reading is impossible, a higher court may make a declaration of incompatibility. Critically, it does not affect the validity or continuing operation of the provision, and it does not bind the parties. Parliamentary sovereignty survives intact.
• Section 6 — unlawful for a public authority to act incompatibly, subject to the defence where primary legislation left no choice.
• Sections 7 and 8 — victim status, the one-year time limit for freestanding HRA claims (shorter under CPR 54 if brought by judicial review), and the just-satisfaction approach to damages.

Then the rights taxonomy. Absolute rights — Article 3 chief among them — permit no balancing whatsoever, which makes any answer option containing the words "proportionate interference with Article 3" automatically wrong. Limited rights such as Article 5 permit interference only on the exhaustively listed grounds. Qualified rights — Articles 8 to 11 — run through the familiar structured test: is the interference prescribed by law, does it pursue a legitimate aim, and is it necessary in a democratic society, which is where proportionality does its work. Know the four-stage proportionality structure well enough to apply it in twenty seconds.

Retained EU law: get the terminology right, because the exam does

This is the part of the syllabus where old revision notes actively mislead people, and where anything you half-remember from a pre-2020 textbook should be treated as suspect.

The historical framework still matters, because you cannot understand the current position without it. Direct effect from Van Gend en Loos; supremacy from Costa v ENEL and, domestically, Factortame; the distinction between regulations (directly applicable) and directives (which bind as to result, are capable of vertical direct effect against emanations of the state, and are not horizontally directly effective, hence indirect effect and the Francovich state liability route). Institutions: Commission, Council, European Parliament, Court of Justice. Preliminary references. That architecture is examinable as background.

What changed is the domestic scaffolding. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 preserved a large body of EU-derived law in domestic law at the end of the implementation period, and that body was labelled retained EU law. The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 then reworked it: from the start of 2024 the surviving body was renamed assimilated law, the principle of the supremacy of EU law over domestic law was ended, and the general principles of EU law were removed as a tool of interpretation. Directly effective rights that had been preserved by section 4 of the 2018 Act were revoked. Courts were given broader latitude to depart from retained case law.

So if a question refers to "assimilated law", that is not a trick — it is the current statutory vocabulary. And if an answer option asserts that EU law still takes precedence over an inconsistent Act of Parliament, it is wrong, whatever your 2019 lecture notes say.uk to confirm the examinable scope before you spend a fortnight on it. The specification is the boundary; nothing else is.

What this looks like in a question

A typical item gives you a domestic regulation made under the European Communities Act 1972, still in force, and a later Act of Parliament that conflicts with it. The best answer will apply ordinary domestic principles — the later statute prevails — rather than any lingering doctrine of EU supremacy. Candidates who learned public law before Brexit get these wrong at a noticeably higher rate than those who learned it after. Awkward, but true.

How to revise it without drowning in theory

Public law tempts you into reading. Reading feels productive and does very little for your score. The subject is one where a ratio of roughly one part reading to three parts question practice pays off faster than almost anything else in FLK1.

A workable approach over four to six weeks, assuming this is one subject among several:

1. Build the judicial review flowchart yourself. One side of A4, handwritten. Preliminary hurdles, then grounds, then remedies. Redraw it from memory twice a week until it is automatic.
2. Learn twelve cases properly, not sixty loosely. One landmark authority per doctrine, with the proposition it stands for in a single line. Anisminic for error of law and ouster clauses. Padfield for improper purpose. Ridge v Baldwin for the right to be heard. Wednesbury for irrationality. Build outwards only if you have time spare, which you won't.
3. Drill in mixed sets. Doing forty consecutive judicial review questions teaches you pattern recognition that evaporates the moment the paper interleaves public law with Tort and Legal Services. Mix your practice.
4. Log every wrong answer by ground, not by case. If you keep confusing illegality with procedural impropriety, that is a categorisation problem and no amount of extra reading fixes it. Targeted repetition does.
5. Sit timed mocks under real conditions. The 180-question format punishes candidates who have only ever answered questions in leisurely blocks of ten.

This is where a decent question bank earns its keep. The Ant Law SQE Question Bank tags items down to sub-topic level, so you can see whether your weakness is legitimate expectation specifically or judicial review generally, and its practice engine pushes previously missed questions and low-accuracy topics back at you on a spacing that actually sticks. If you want a second opinion on question style before committing, CELE SQE is worth a look too. Whatever tool you choose, the criterion for the best SQE question bank is boringly practical: does it show you why the distractor was wrong, and does it force you back onto your weak areas without you having to remember to do it?

Where this sits in the wider route

Passing FLK1 and FLK2 is one component of solicitor qualification in England and Wales, not the whole thing. You also need a qualifying degree or equivalent, SQE2's five practical skills assessments, two years of qualifying work experience (QWE) signed off in accordance with SRA requirements, and to satisfy the SRA on character and suitability. Published SQE pass rates vary between sittings and between candidate cohorts; read the SRA's own statistical reports for the current picture rather than the version circulating in group chats, and treat them as trend data rather than a prediction about you.

Fees, booking windows and sitting dates all move.uk before you build a study timetable around them.

Here is your concrete next step. Take one hour this week, draw the judicial review sequence from memory, then run thirty mixed constitutional and administrative law questions against the clock and see how many of your errors were preliminary-hurdle blunders rather than substantive ones. That single diagnostic tells you more about your public law readiness than a weekend of re-reading.ai, on web, iOS or Android.