First, I want to express my gratitude and sense of honour in being invited to deliver the Lionel Cohen lecture for 1995. The relationship between the Israeli and the British legal systems is a close and mutually beneficial one, and we in Britain in particular owe large debts to the legal community in Israel. This is especially the case in my field, public law, where distinguished academics have enriched our academic literature, notably Justice Zamir, whose work on the declaratory judgment has been so influential. Israeli courts, too, have made major contributions to the development of the common law generally and judicial review very notably.

In this lecture I want to discuss the process of constitutional reform in the United Kingdom, and to explore some of the difficulties that lie in the way of reform. Some quite radical reforms to our system of government — the introduction of executive agencies in the British civil service, for instance—have been introduced without resort to legislation. There has been a spate of reform to local government and the National Health Service.