There’s a certain honesty in the way that our American cousins approach the relationship between politics and law.

They don’t pretend that the judicial branch of government is somehow immune from and above politics. Indeed, in a new book from former US Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, he takes his lifetime of political and legal experience and channels it into a debate that has been raging for some time in legal circles about the right approach to take to interpretation of the meaning of laws made by its parliament and to interpreting the Constitution.