A Lawyer Speaks

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com The Criminal Cases Review Commission is not a failing institution, inspectors said in a report published yesterday . In the 60 cases they examined, caseworkers had reached the right decisions in their recommendations to commissioners. But in too many cases staff investigating suspected miscarriages of justice went...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com “This consultation,” wrote David Lammy just over three weeks ago , “proposes some of the biggest reforms to family law in decades — bringing the law into the 21st century, helping families feel better off and increasing protections for millions.” Top marks if you already know what he’s talking about; family lawyer...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com The employment tribunal system is broken, lawyers dealing with workplace disputes will tell you. It can take three or four years to get a hearing and the delays are expected to get much worse next year. Throwing money at the problem is unlikely to work, even if there was any to spare. But a new academic study of t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com There can’t be many compensation claims with legal costs in the millions and damages in double-digit billions. Perhaps one of them is Trump v BBC — I have updated yesterday’s piece to include the judge’s threat to throw out the case after the president’s lawyers missed a deadline. But not even Donald Trump is clai...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com While ministers insist that the only way of ending delays in the Crown Court is to limit the use of juries, a judge responsible for non-jury trials has achieved what’s been described as an “inspiring success” in reducing backlogs. Through collaboration across the criminal justice system of Scotland, Aisha Anwar KC...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Gray’s Inn is paying tribute to an illustrious former member, 400 years after his death. Sir Francis Bacon was one of the most influential figures in British intellectual history and a lawyer whose life and career were deeply intertwined with the inn of court where he felt most at home. At a dinner in hall tonight...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com In a judgment published last Thursday , a circuit judge sitting in Walsall explained that he was referring two solicitors to their regulator because false AI-generated case citations had been submitted in an appeal he was hearing. “Lawyers who cite fictitious cases must face serious consequences, ” said Judge Grim...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com As presaged in the King’s speech, the government’s Courts and Tribunals Bill was reintroduced in the House of Commons yesterday. It picks up where it left off, though no date has yet been announced for the bill’s report stage and third reading. Will the government’s plans to limit jury trial ever reach the House o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com The international legal order is facing profound disruption, a leading lawyer said last night. Professor Lord Verdirame KC said that institutions created or expanded after the end of the Cold War in 1989 had “too often responded with misguided moralistic fervour and interpretative maximalism, stretching mandates b...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com A year has passed since the UK Supreme Court decided that when parliament used the terms “man” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 it was referring to biological sex, not acquired gender. That seemed clear enough, but some academics appear not to have understood it. How can that be? And will things be any clearer...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com A former chair of the bar has called for a wide-ranging review of the way that expert evidence is used in the courts of England and Wales. Speaking to one of the City of London livery companies just before Easter, Sam Townend KC said the use of experts had led to “something of a crisis in judicial and public confi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Sir Andrew McFarlane never expected to become a barrister. He had no particular interest in family law until he took the case that changed his life. His rapid promotion from the High Court to the Court of Appeal came as a surprise. The post of president of the family division was not one he aspired to. And he cert...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com New sentencing laws take effect next week. Judges and magistrates in England and Wales will be able to suspend sentences of up to three years. And courts will have to suspend sentences of not more than 12 months unless there are “exceptional circumstances”. Because very short sentences are generally thought to be...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com The rule of law, as a phrase, is opaque, the head of civil justice said this week . As Sir Geoffrey Vos explained , “non-lawyers and even many lawyers think it is about the enforcement of law against citizens rather than enforcing, or rather upholding, the rights of citizens against the state.” The master of the r...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com “Any decision about the care and treatment of a mentally incapacitated adult, including the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, must be taken in the patient’s best interests,” the Court of Appeal said on Tuesday . “There is no carve-out for ‘clinical decisions’,” the court added, overruling a decision by a hi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com How is it possible to enforce a judgment from the courts of one state against the government of another? That’s the topic I discuss on this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks. My guest is Jehad Mustafa , a partner at Farrer & Co who specialises in state immunity, and we spoke at the solicitors’ historic (and partly...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com After months of uncertainty, the government is pressing ahead with its plans to curb the right to trial by jury in England and Wales. Legislation is to be introduced “next month”, a minister says . Sir Brian Leveson expects the government to publish its bill even sooner, he tells me in this week’s episode of A Law...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com This year will be a tipping point in which the majority of the legal industry will be AI-powered, a leading solicitor said in a comment released for publication this week. But what does that mean? Is artificial intelligence going to take over from the real thing? Will lawyers no longer be needed? “We predict that...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com As the High Court begins hearing allegations today that the publishers of the Daily Mail hacked into phones used by the Duke of Sussex and other public figures, I thought it would be a good time to look at the most successful phone hacking operation ever carried out by law enforcement organisations in the United K...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Reducing the availability of jury trial is neither principled nor pragmatic, the incoming chair of the bar argued last night. In her inaugural address , Kirsty Brimelow KC said her first priority was to lead the Bar Council’s opposition to planned Ministry of Justice reforms. She said : The constitutional principl...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com Gibraltar’s senior police officer was “in effect… forced out” of his job in 2020 as a result of assertions by the British overseas territory’s acting governor Nick Pyle and the chief minister Fabian Picardo KC that they had lost confidence in him, an inquiry by a retired British High Court judge has found . In a 7...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com With parliament and many of the courts not sitting, I can’t promise to publish a report every day over the next two or three weeks. But I don’t want 2025 to fade away without marking the 25th anniversary of White v White , a groundbreaking ruling from 2000 in which the UK’s most senior judges said that the divisio...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com In its report earlier this month on the collapse of a high-profile Chinese espionage case, parliament’s joint committee on the national security strategy found evidence of questionable decision-making, misaligned expectations and failures to take potential opportunities that could remedy problems. “Some aspects ar...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com People respond to outcomes rather than reasoning, the deputy president of the UK Supreme Court told me last week. Lord Hodge was reflecting on the reaction to the court’s ruling in the For Women Scotland case , where he gave the leading judgment. “We decided the question of statutory interpretation,” he explained,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rozenberg.substack.com We still don’t know why leaked government plans reported on Tuesday of last week — “juries will decide only murder, rape or manslaughter cases” — were so different from what ministers announced this Tuesday. It turns out that jury trial will be retained for cases where the likely sentence is over three years and f...