Legal Profession
News, analysis, comment and updates from ICLR's case law and UK legislation platform
Paul Magrath reviews the new edition of a lawyer’s guide to effective legal language. … Continue reading
This is both a case book and a memoir, by one of our leading criminal practitioners. The cases are famous ones that got massive newspaper coverage at the time, and the man described in the memoir is both a typical and in some ways not a typical criminal law defender. Review by Paul Magrath.… Continue reading
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
Whoever the Secret Barrister is, they deserve massive kudos for drawing to the attention of those who might well prefer to look away the critical state of the criminal justice system in this country.… 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
