In the second part of this two-volume study, Ian Loveland delves deeply into the immediate historical and political context of the Trethowan litigation which began in New South Wales in 1930 and reached the Privy Council two years later. The litigation centred on the efforts of a conservatively-inclined government to prevent a future Labour administration led by the then radical politician Jack Lang abolishing the upper house of the State-s legislature by entrenching the existence of the upper house through the legal device of requiring that its abolition be approved by a state-wide referendum. The book carefully examines the immediate political and legal routes of the entrenchment device fashioned by the State-s Premier Sir Thomas Bavin and his former law student, colleague and then Dean of the Sydney University law school Sir John Peden, and places the doctrinal arguments advanced in subsequent litigation in the State courts, before the High Court and finally in the Privy Coun
