The Crown

The Crown is a political concept used in Commonwealth realms, analogous to the concept of the state in legal systems influenced by Roman civil law.

English common law never developed a concept of the state and left supreme executive power with the monarch. The concept of the Crown as a corporation sole developed in the Kingdom of England as a separation of the physical crown and property of the kingdom from the person and personal property of the monarch. It spread through English and later British colonisation, becoming embedded in the legal lexicon of the British dominions. As the dominions gained control over the royal prerogative in the 1930s, the concept evolved such that 'the Crown in right of' each realm and territory acts independently of the other realms and territories.

Depending on the context, it may refer to the entirety of the state, the executive government specifically (either of a realm or one of its provinces, states or territories) or only to the monarch and their direct representatives. The Crown as a political concept should not be confused with physical crowns, such as those of the British regalia.

Definition

The term the Crown does not have a single definition. Legal scholars Maurice Sunkin and Sebastian Payne opined, "the nature of the Crown has been taken for granted, in part because it is fundamental and, in part, because many academics have no idea what the term the Crown amounts to". Nicholas Browne-Wilkinson theorised that the Crown is "an amorphous, abstract concept" and, thus, "impossible to define", while William Wade stated the Crown "means simply the Queen".

Warren J. Newman described the Crown as "a useful and convenient means of conveying, in a word, the compendious formal, executive and administrative powers and apparatus attendant upon the modern constitutional and monarchical state."