The Legislative Council is the revising chamber of Tynwald, the Isle of Man's bicameral parliament. Most legislation begins in the directly elected House of Keys, then comes upstairs to be polished, questioned, and sometimes amended. Once in a while the Council originates its own bills. The Equality Act 2017 was one such case, drafted and introduced in the upper chamber before going across to the Keys. The Council meets in its own chamber inside the Legislative Buildings on Finch Road, but for the great set-piece occasions, both houses sit together as Tynwald Court. On 5 July each year (Tynwald Day), in keeping with a tradition stretching back over a thousand years, they all walk up to Tynwald Hill at St John's, where new laws are read aloud in English and Manx Gaelic to the open air.

Eight of the Council's eleven members are elected, but not by the public. They are chosen by the members of the House of Keys, in a process that has been notorious for its complexity. Until 2017, MLC elections could grind on for weeks or months, requiring ballot after ballot. New standing orders that year streamlined the system, and in 2018 the election was completed in a single ballot, though some critics complained that members were voting for too many candidates at once. By 2023 the average MHK supported about five candidates per ballot. An MLC must be at least twenty-one years old and resident in the Isle of Man, and serves for five years. Four seats turn over at a time, on a rotating cycle. Recent practice has moved away from filling the upper chamber with former MHKs, though for most of LegCo's history that was the default.

Walk back through LegCo's history and you find it shedding members and prerogatives like a tree losing leaves. The original council was the executive arm of the Lieutenant Governor, packed with Crown appointees and church officials: the First and Second Deemsters, the Attorney General, the Receiver General, the Water Bailiff, the Archdeacon and Vicar General of Sodor and Man. Before the Reformation, the Abbot of Rushen sat in the room. The Water Bailiff lost his seat in 1885. The Clerk of the Rolls went in 1917. The Archdeacon, Vicar General, and Receiver General were stripped out in 1919, replaced by four indirectly elected members. Across the twentieth century the elected share grew while judicial and clerical seats dwindled. In 1980 the Lieutenant Governor stopped presiding. In 1990 he was removed entirely as President of Tynwald. Each reform pulled the chamber a little further from the Crown and a little closer to the Keys.

In 2016 the British constitutional expert Lord Lisvane was asked to review how Tynwald functioned. He recommended that MLCs should be nominated by an independent commission rather than chosen by the Keys, that they should not vote on taxation or appropriation, and that they should rarely serve as ministers. He also recommended that the Bishop of Sodor and Man should continue as a voting member. Little of the rest has been implemented. The Council remains as it is: an indirectly elected revising chamber where one of the eleven seats still belongs, ex officio, to a Church of England bishop whose diocese was carved out by the Vikings. Asked why, Manx parliamentarians tend to shrug. Tradition, on this island, is itself a form of constitution.