It is conventional wisdom, at least among lawyers, that the Constitution of the United Kingdom is in its essentials the creation of the common law - an accretion of legal principles derived from judicial decisions which determine for the most part how the country is to be run from day to day. Apart from the historic texts - Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights - statutes were until this century regarded, by lawyers if not by Parliamentarians, as dangerous reefs in the great ocean of the common law, to be observed chiefly in order to circumnavigate them. During this century the body of statute law has broken the surface at many points, forming sometimes small islands - such as the unnecessary but minor incursion of the legislature into the judge-made law of judicial review - and sometimes great land-masses like the modern law of real property, supplanting the common law and equity, or whole continents of social and economic provision for which the common law itself has no remit.

LRB 8 May 1997 | PDF Download