Law

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Justice Secretary would resign if UK breaks law in ‘unacceptable’ way

Robert Buckland – ‘I will resign’ if government breaks law in ‘unacceptable’ way The Justice Secretary Robert Buckland was put on the spot this morning over the government’s proposed Internal Market Bill, which is due to be introduced to the House of Commons tomorrow. The bill intends to override aspects of the Northern Ireland Protocol – a part of the official Withdrawal Agreement – to give ministers the right to modify rules on customs, if there is no final trade deal agreed by December. Andrew Marr quizzed Buckland about whether using these powers would breach international law: AM: Is that the moment that [you] resign from the government – if

Thursday

Andrew Doyle

Could possession of the Bible become an offence in Scotland?

For the Scottish National party, the phrase ‘nanny state’ is not so much a criticism as an aspiration. This is the party that wanted to assign a state guardian to every child born in Scotland through its ‘named person’ scheme, only to be thwarted by the Supreme Court. Under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, there have been repeated attempts to regulate the eating and drinking habits of people, including proposed bans on two-for-one pizza deals and minimum pricing on cheaper alcoholic drinks. It makes sense, then, that the party’s paternalism should extend to the question of free speech. Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Bill was ostensibly proposed to repeal outdated

Sunday

Steven Barrett

The Begum Appeal is a fundamental error of logic

There has been an emotional response to the case of Shamima Begum, quite rightly. It is not clear to me that lawyers are better equipped than politicians to navigate such emotions, but sadly we live in an age which is increasingly demanding legal answers to political questions. What is perhaps surprising is that, with uncharacteristic vigour, our Court of Appeal have jumped headfirst into the maelstrom. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) – created to consider cases like these – found against Ms Begum in February, which seemed largely uncontroversial at the time. But the latest decision was made by three Court of Appeal Judges, who turned their minds to two questions:

Sunday

Steven Barrett

Was Dominic Cummings acting legally?

As a lawyer, I am firmly against the politicisation of law. It is important to remember that we who serve justice do so for everyone – not merely for people we like or to advance political causes. ‘Lockdown’ has so far been three different legal regimes, and for ease, I’ll restrict myself here to the first one. Under that, we all had the power in reg. 6(1) to leave the house whenever we had a “reasonable excuse”. What it said was “During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse”. What that means is: provided we had a reasonable excuse, we could leave

Tuesday

Thomas Grant QC

Who killed courtroom drama?

The death in February of one of the titans of the Bar, John Mathew QC, cut another link with the post-war period of ebullient criminality and showy trials. Mathew defended one of the Great Train Robbers and David Holmes in the Jeremy Thorpe trials, and prosecuted the Krays and Harry Roberts. He remembered a period when you could park your car outside the Old Bailey and saunter through its grand main entrance unhindered by the tiresome security apparatus lawyers and members of the public are subject to today. But he also recalled a time when jury nobbling and police perjury were common. Any study of the true-crime shelves of Waterstones

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Scotland’s new ‘hate speech’ rules are a modern blasphemy law

It is 178 years since the last recorded charge of blasphemy in Scotland, against the Edinburgh bookseller Thomas Paterson for ‘exhibiting placards of a profane nature’ in his shop window in 1842. One of those placards announced that ‘Paterson & Co (of the Blasphemy Depot, London)… Beg to acquaint infidels in general and Christians in particular that… [we] will sell all kinds of printed works which are calculated to enlighten, without corrupting — to bring into contempt the demoralising trash our priests palm upon the credulous as divine revelation — and to expose the absurdity of, as well as the horrible effects springing from, the debasing god-idea.’ For good measure

Thursday

Peter Jones

Could a sex-strike solve Brexit?

Last week the Lawyers Group of the charity Classics for All held its fifth moot (cf. ‘meet’) in the Supreme Court, under the stern gaze of Lady Arden. Previous moots have tried Socrates, Brutus and Cassius, Antigone, and Verres, corrupt governor of Sicily. The Romans put such moots at the heart of their education. The purpose was to teach men how to win the political — and, even more, legal —battles necessary to climb the greasy pole to power. Pupils would be asked to make the best case they could for or against the sides involved in historical or mythical situations (suasoriae, e.g. ‘did Orestes legally kill his mother?’, ‘Should

Thursday

Gus Carter

The unparalleled entertainment – and heartbreaking reality – of watching a court hearing

‘Barristers’ speeches vanish quicker than Chinese dinners, and even the greatest victory in court rarely survives longer than the next Sunday’s papers.’ So wrote John Mortimer in Rumpole of the Bailey. While no doubt true, a barrister delivering a well-honed speech is still something to behold. They are the last defenders of a rhetorical tradition that our politicians have all but given up on. Many QCs still use Cicero’s principles of oratory: to teach, to entertain and to move. The public are allowed to watch almost any court hearing, but few ever do. As a court reporter, I have been struck by how empty the public galleries tend to be,

Thursday

Rory Geoghegan

How verbal and physical abuse drove me out of the police

The past decade has not been kind to those we entrust, in the words of Sir Robert Peel, ‘to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen’. Since 2010, police numbers have fallen by more than 20,000, with too many choosing to leave the force owing to physical and emotional assaults in a stressed and underfunded job. I can sympathise, because I had to step away from the front line and the job I loved three years ago. At the time, friends and family repeatedly asked me why I felt I had to leave. Set against the latest news of escalating assaults on police, I’m not so

Wednesday

Richard Walton

How police can take back control of Britain’s streets

Boris Johnson’s pledge to fund an extra 20,000 police officers was a serious sign of intent, a game-changing moment for policing and a huge boost for law and order on Britain’s streets. But how can these new officers quickly reverse the spike in knife and violent crime that has plagued Britain? There are six pressing challenges that the new Home Secretary Priti Patel needs to address if she is to succeed in her strategy to crack down on crime: increasing crime levels, greater demands and reduced budgets for police; decline in neighbourhood officers; new national security threats; a disempowered police workforce and a policing model outpaced by technology. It is clear that neighbourhood policing

Thursday

Peter Jones

Seduction and the Boris bus

Boris Johnson is to be tried at the Crown Court on the grounds that, during the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign, he crucially affected the referendum result by arguing that the UK paid the EU £350 million a week, ignoring another interpretation that the sum was only £250 million a week. Ancient Greeks knew all about advocating one side of an issue, as a law suit exemplifies. Euphiletus was the defendant in a homicide case brought against him by the relatives of one Eratosthenes. The relatives claimed that Euphiletus had murdered Eratosthenes after luring, or even forcing, him into his house as part of a premeditated plan. But Euphiletus’s defence (we

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

By George

At last a podcast that takes the medium to its limit, created by someone who loves listening, understands how it can take the imagination to places visual images alone cannot, and wants to make use of this, not just for fun but with real intent. Have You Heard George’s Podcast? was last week awarded UK Podcast of the Year, and rightly so. I’ve never heard anything quite like it. At times George’s playfulness and gift for exploring the full meaning of the words he uses reminded me of early Tom Stoppard; other episodes were more like a Radio 1Xtra documentary about life on the street or the rise of drill.

Thursday

Chris Daw KC

A bitter pill

I have been a defence lawyer for more than 25 years. I have defended clients charged with almost every crime there is. I have argued against convictions for robbery, rape, sexual assault, murder, manslaughter, copyright theft, perverting the course of justice, perjury, serious fraud, international illegal fishing, money laundering, causing death by dangerous driving, grievous bodily harm, blackmail… and the list goes on. Of all the crimes and misdemeanours I have seen, all the improbable tales and shocking lies in the witness box, what sticks with me most about the criminal justice system is the utter simplicity of the one thing that lies behind almost all of it. People want

Monday

Matthew Scott

Shamima Begum has a right to legal aid

Speaking on the radio this morning, the Foreign Secretary refused the temptation to condemn the Legal Aid Authority’s grant of legal aid to Shamima Begum. He was right to do so. We give legal aid to those accused of murder and genocide. This is not because we have sympathy with murderers and genocidal killers but because it is overwhelmingly in the public interest that criminal trials are fair, and that people are punished only when their guilt has been fairly established in accordance with the law. Once a crime passes a certain level of seriousness, legal aid for those without the means to pay is automatic. It would be absurd

Friday

Siva Thangarajah

The Spectator Podcast: how Brexit descended into chaos

This week we reached a new level of chaos in British politics. With parliament voting down all indicatives vote options, as well as May’s deal for the third time, the Prime Minister was running out of moves. So that’s how we find ourselves here: with a Prime Minister reaching out to Jeremy Corbyn. James Forsyth writes in this week’s cover article that the Iraq War, the financial crash, and the expenses scandal may have damaged the public’s faith in their politicians, but the impact of a failure to deliver Brexit will be even worse. The entire process has created an impression of a self-serving enclave of politicians who are interested

Thursday

Chris Daw KC

Blurred lines | 4 April 2019

It is late, on a wet Tuesday evening in November, and I am driving home, listening to endless talk of Brexit on the radio. The phone rings in the car and cuts off the news. It’s an unknown mobile number; I press the answer button on the steering wheel. A moment’s hesitation and a woman’s voice comes over the speakers; middle-aged, well-spoken. She’s almost in tears and struggles to get her words out. ‘You don’t know me, and I’m so sorry to ring you this late. I got your number from my lawyer friend Stuart, and he told me you are the person I need to call. It’s about my

Thursday

Dominic Green

The real RBG

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is too ill to sit on the Supreme Court. When she saw On the Basis of Sex, a hagiography written by her nephew, she must have thought she had already gone to heaven. Directed by Mimi Leder to the highest TV-movie standards, this prequel to the obsequious 2018 documentary RBG will appeal to all purchasers of the grovelling 2015 biography, Notorious RBG. The real RBG totters across the last frames of this movie like the laminated ghost of American liberalism. Such idolatry diminishes Bader Ginsburg’s achievement, the unpicking in 1971 of the first of 178 laws discriminating against you-know-who on the basis of you-know-what. But this film

Tuesday

Matthew Scott

There’s no presumption of innocence for the wrongly imprisoned

The greatest criminal barrister of all time, Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, who probably saved more men and women from the gallows than anyone in English history, was famous for his ‘scales of justice’ speech, in which, as described in Sally Smith’s magnificent biography, he would stand for several long minutes with his arms outstretched at shoulder height and say: ‘It may appear that the scales of justice are first weighed on one side in favour of the prisoner and then on the other against the prisoner. As counsel on either side puts the evidence in the scales, I can call to my fancy a great statue of Justice holding

Monday

Stephen Daisley

The traditionalist worldview has gone from orthodoxy to punchline to nostalgia to ‘hate’ in a startlingly short space of time

I recently rewatched The Birdcage, Mike Nichols’ pleasing farce of clashing values, a Hollywood adaption of Jean Poiret’s lighter, sharper 1973 play La Cage aux Folles. The son of drag club owner Armand Goldman (a dialled-up Robin Williams) has proposed to the daughter of Republican Senator Kevin Keeley (Gene Hackman, almost camper than Williams) and tries to arrange a dinner for the two families without Keeley discovering that Armand is gay. In the end, everyone learns to get along and some riotous slapstick disrupts the mildly preachy tone. It’s not Nichols’ best work but in 1996 it was a step up from the Four Fucks and a Funeral movies that

Thursday

Matthew Scott

The £1 billion IT project that has caused chaos in the criminal courts

Between 2010 and 2015 the Ministry of Justice endured amongst the deepest cuts of any government department. Yet even as over £2 billion was saved by closing courts, cutting legal aid and allowing prisons to become dangerous, rat-infested, spice-ridden hell-holes, the Ministry of Justice was powering ahead with a £1 billion plan to ‘digitise’ the court system. Unlike the cockroaches crawling along the prison landings it sounded slick and modern, and to some extent it was successful. Most criminal case ‘papers’ are now accessible electronically, a considerable convenience to all concerned, though advocates usually prefer – at their own expense – to print out hard copies for use in court.