Dicey, Albert Venn (1835–1922)

Albert Venn Dicey was an influential British professor of law whose book An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution organized ancient and modern theories of law into a single constitutional principle he termed the rule of law.

Dicey was born on February 4, 1835, the third son of the owner of The Northampton Mercury, a weekly newspaper. His middle name paid homage to the social reformer and logician John Venn, in whose Clapham Sect of reformers the Dicey family was quite active. Albert was taught at home before entering King's College School, London, and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a double first in classics and where he found a circle of friends, among them Algernon Swinburne, T. H. Green, and ...