This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites 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 that's where judges come in.

But what are judges doing when the interpreter 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 role 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

...