Reviews

The latest novel to chart the career of Peter Murphy’s increasingly successful young criminal barrister Ben Schroeder combines the horribly contemporary issue of historic sexual abuse with a gripping courtroom drama in which the laws of evidence and the interests of national security are in play, set during the murky political era of the early 1970s.… Continue reading

The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA) is the latest step in bringing the hitherto unknown surveillance activities of the State into the light and under statutory control through ‘world-leading oversight’, or — depending on your point of view — the “the most intrusive surveillance regime of any democracy” that legitimises the surveillance State. (The former was how then Home Secretary Amber Rudd described it in a departmental press release; the latter was the reaction of the human rights campaign group, Liberty.)… Continue reading

ITV was given unprecedented access to the workings of the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) but the resulting documentary was long on sentiment and rather short on legal explanation, reports Paul Magrath… Continue reading

Elanor Dymott used to work for ICLR as a law reporter. Then she became a novelist. Silver and Salt is her second book and makes excellent holiday reading for the long vacation, as Paul Magrath finds out.… Continue reading

Helen Stalford, Kathryn Hollingsworth and Stephen Gilmore (eds), Rewriting children’s rights judgments: from academic vision to new practice (Hart publishing, 2017) Reviewed by David Burrows   Judgments from a children’s perspective The authors describe their aim in Rewriting children’s rights judgments as of revisiting existing case law and redrafting judgements from a children’s rights perspective.… Continue reading

Paul Magrath reviews the second volume of Peter Murphy’s  entertaining short stories about the Resident Judge of Bermondsey Crown Court This second volume of short stories about Charlie Walden, the resident judge of Bermondsey Crown Court, confirms his status as one of the enduring characters of legal fiction. But although the tales are told with… Continue reading

Depictions of the English legal system in art are rather less common than, say, its appearances in legal dramas or novels. This is surprising, given the opportunities it affords for the study of human nature in crisis. But one artist who has done justice to the subject is the 19th century British painter, Abraham Solomon. “Waiting for… Continue reading

Richard Barr wrote a regular column for the  Solicitors Journal for many years. Now the best of his musings on life as a solicitor in a country firm have now been collected into a book, mysteriously titled The Savage Poodle. Review by Paul Magrath. According to his publishers, Richard Barr is a clinical negligence lawyer with… Continue reading