This is philosophy bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy Bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
Philosophy Bytes is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
The US has a document marked constitution.
Would the United Kingdom be better off if its most basic legal rules were also laid out in a single text?
Of course any rule has to be interpreted, and thats where judges come in.
But what are judges doing when they interpret a constitution?
Are they merely trying to work out the intention of those who set the rules?
John Gardner is the professor of jurisprudence at the University of Oxford.
John Gardner, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you, Nigel.
The topic we're going to focus on is constitutions.
Could you say what a constitution is to start with?
Well, some people think of a constitution as a big roll of parchment with the word constitution written at the top.
And when people were fighting just a few years ago about whether the European Union should have one, I think that's what they were discussing.
They thought it would be a matter of huge symbolic importance if it got a big role of parchment with the word constitution at the top.
Little did it occur to them that, of course, the European Union already had a constitution, because it has a legal system.
And the constitution is really best understood to be the fundamental set of rules for a legal system that organize government according to law.
The rules by which a particular state operates that have been codified, written down at some point.