Pickin v British Railways Board [1974] UKHL 1 is a UK constitutional law case, concerning parliamentary sovereignty.

He argued the board did not comply with standing orders of each House of Parliament that required individual notice to be given to owners affected by private legislation.

Lord Denning MR said the following: The rule, as all members of the Bar know is that a charge of fraud is not to be placed on the record without evidence to support it.

We are told by Mr. Tackaberry (who appears for Mr. Herrick Collins) that these paragraphs were pleaded by counsel because he had evidence before him to warrant it.

I read them as a charge that the board or their advisers consciously misled Parliament and by these means got section 18 enacted as it was.

They have applied a supposed principle of English law, which was stated by Willes J. in 1871 in Lee v. Bude and Torrington Junction Railway Co. (1871) L.R.

If an Act of Parliament has been obtained improperly, it is for the legislature to correct it by repealing it: but, so long as it exists as law, the courts are bound to obey it.

It is no doubt an old authority, but it says in terms that if a private Act of Parliament is obtained by fraud, the courts can investigate it.

The Court of Session had by a majority refused to entertain the suggestion that a private Act of Parliament was obtained by fraud.

But a note was taken of what Lord Hardwicke LC said, at p. 7445: "The Lord Chancellor, in delivering his opinion, expressed a good deal of indignation at the fraudulent means of obtaining the act; and said, that he never would have consented to such private acts, had he ever entertained a notion that they could be used to cover fraud.

It is not therefore allowed to be a publick, but a mere private statute; it is not printed or published among the other laws of the session; it heath been relieved against, when obtained upon fraudulent suggestions;"Blackstone refers for that proposition to M'Kenzie v. Stewart.

He invited us to give the words of Willes J. their full scope and strike out these two paragraphs in the reply.

It followed that Pickin could not claim that the British Railways Board had fraudulently misled Parliament, so as to vitiate an act.