Statute of Westminster 1931
History

England, and Britain after 1707, had colonies outside of Europe since the late 16th century. These early colonies were largely run by private companies rather than the Crown directly, but by the end of the century had (except for India) been subsumed under Crown control. Oversight of these colonies oscillated between relatively lax enforcement of laws and centralisation of power depending on the politics of the day, but the Parliament in Westminster always remained supreme. Most colonies in North America broke away from British rule and became independent as the United States in the late 18th century, whereafter British attention turned towards Australia and Asia.

British policy with regards to the colonies began to be rationalized and streamlined in the 19th century. Responsible government, wherein colonial governments were held accountable to legislatures just as the British cabinet was responsible to the British Parliament, was granted to colonies beginning with Nova Scotia in 1848. Confusion existed as to what extent British legislation applied to the colonies; in South Australia, justice Benjamin Boothby caused a nuisance by striking down several local laws as contrary ("repugnant") to the legislation in Britain. Westminster rectified this situation by passing the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865, which allowed the colonies to pass legislation different from that in Britain provided that it was not repugnant to any law expressly passed by the Imperial Parliament to extend to that colony. This had the dual effect of granting colonies autonomy within their borders while subordinating them to the British Parliament otherwise.

Most of the remaining colonies in North America – everything north of the United States with the exception of Newfoundland – were merged into a federal polity known as "Canada" in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Canada was termed a " dominion ", a term previously used in slightly different contexts in English history, and granted a broad array of powers between the federal government and the provincial governments. Australia was similarly deemed a dominion when it federated in 1901, as were Newfoundland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Irish Free State in the first decades of the 20th century.

Dominions did not possess full sovereignty on an equal footing with the United Kingdom. The parliament of Canada passed a law barring appeals from its Supreme Court to the imperial Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1888, but in 1925 a judgement of the Privy Council determined that this law was invalid. Combined with the King–Byng affair the following year, this bred resentment in Canada and led to its insistence on full sovereignty. The leadership of the Irish Free State, meanwhile, was dominated by those who had fought a war of independence against Britain and who had agreed to dominion status as a compromise; they took a maximalist view of the autonomy they had secured in the Anglo-Irish Treaty and pushed for recognition of their state's sovereignty, which would have implications for the other dominions as well. The 1926 Imperial Conference led to the Balfour declaration that dominions were equal in status to one another and to the United Kingdom. Further conferences in 1929 and 1930 worked out a substantive framework to implement this declaration. This became the Statute of Westminster 1931.
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