Constitutions

Professor Michael Gordon, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Liverpool, opens the Oxford Putney Debates 2020 with a Keynote Lecture on The Future of Parliamentary Sovereignty in a Democratic Constitution.

Join us for our first ever series of online debates on the subject of parliamentary sovereignty, hosted by the UK's leading legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg and the founder of the Oxford Putney Debates Prof Denis Galligan.

Watch the video to find out all you need to know about this year's Oxford Putney Debates - staged for the first time as a weekly series of live webinars, hosted by Joshua Rozenberg and Prof Denis Galligan, and available to watch from the comfort of your home.

Senior Research Fellow in Politics Professor Iain McLean unearths the secrets of Adam Smith's lost work on jurisprudence, and posits a connection between smith's jurisprudence and the framers of the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Katarína Šipulová recounts the capture of one arm of the state – the judiciary – in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where post-Soviet democratization was largely influenced by the EU accession conditionality, and consequently paid little regard to the specific factors at play in the region, leading to vague rules and poor oversight of the judiciary, which was consequently captured from within.