‘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.
The Secret Barrister is an anonymous criminal barrister, who has been blogging for several years about the criminal justice system to great acclaim. The plight of the barrister is not, at least superficially, a terribly sympathetic one: fat cats caricatured by the press, living off the proceeds of a generous legal aid system. As the Secret Barrister puts it, ‘for professional advocates, barristers do a strikingly bad job of explaining what we do, or why it matters’. The Secret Barrister takes on this thankless task, following the life of a criminal trial, from charge through to appeal, dispelling myths, righting wrongs and telling anecdotes.
There are, it quickly becomes apparent, a few problems. The Crown Prosecution Service is judged only on how many convictions it secures. Among the decent, hard-working solicitors there exist some less scrupulous, ready to sell clients down the river for a guilty plea and a quick buck.
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