Setting the bar too high

‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’ says Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part II. Mostly, this has been written off by literature undergraduates and fridge magnet makers as a joke at the expense of one of the oldest professions; but there’s another interpretation. Dick, although a comic character, was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, who believed that by disrupting law and order he could overthrow the king and stand in his place. What this line actually means is that lawyers independent of the state are the final bastion of civilised society. Without lawyers, society falls apart.

This premise is examined in two new books, both written by practising barristers: the Secret Barrister’s Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken, and In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law, by Sarah Langford.