The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

108 Values and Civil and Political Liberties
and protection of those persons likely to be injured
should there be violence. (Nonetheless, the crime is still
confined to blasphemous remarks about Christianity.)
The lack in the United Kingdom of a formal constitution,
setting out major governmental structures in a framework
enunciating values, has meant that there has been
little principled debate about political issues as these
individually arise and that argument has tended to be
empirical, rather than purposive, and legalistic, rather
than value-oriented.
Here is not the place to debate the merits of an
interests, will, consensual, habitual or command theory
of law. Jurisprudence is a many-splendoured mansion
and there are valid aspects within each theory. But,
whichever or whatever admixture of theory is adopted,
all depend upon the values of those with interests or
upon the values of the willing, consenting, recognising
or commanding actors. In summary, whenever and
howsoever particular laws are evolved, developed,
interpreted or applied, such laws are the outcome of
choices made between competing values, which motivate
law-makers and law-appliers, whether legislators, judges
or practitioners of administration. The reader will note
that this is merely an extension of what was said about
economic and social policy-making in the last Lecture.
Once enacted, law and the institutions it creates
reinforce particular values behind the legal rules. The
law also enables those persons operating institutions to
further their own values by influencing interpretation
and application in particular circumstances. Even those
who have tended to idealise English law in Burkean and
Blackstonian fashion as reflecting tradition, accept that
law affects attitudes, that is, beliefs and values and viceversa.
1
Some 17 long years ago, having done the exercise of
skimming through Halsbury's Laws of England and