A Lawyer Speaks

Dawn Sturgess was fatally poisoned in 2018 after spraying herself with what she believed to be perfume. In fact, it was the military-grade nerve agent Novichok. It’s believed that the perfume bottle had been thrown away by Russian agents who had used it in an unsuccessful attempt to murder the former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia earlier in the year. An unexpec...

Next week, Gregory Jones KC will take up residence at the most famous criminal court in the world. I don’t mean he’ll be the resident judge; Alderman Jones will actually be living over the cells at the Old Bailey — or, to be more precise, a few floors up. His fellow sheriff David Chalk will also move into a flat at the Central Criminal Court. What do the sheriffs do? And why would they spend a yea...

The Ministry of Justice has been ordered to pay more than £900 in damages and costs to a motorist after his car was wrongly clamped by an enforcement agent who had been instructed to collect an unpaid fine. Michael Burton, 49, who lives near Hull, had bought the car on hire-purchase — which meant it belonged to a finance company until all the payments had been made. He says it was clamped by Craig...

Harry Dunn’s parents are no longer seeking to appeal against a High Court ruling that the US intelligence analyst who caused the teenage motorcyclist’s death by careless driving nearly five years ago was entitled to diplomatic immunity, their lawyers have told me. The finding that Anne Sacoolas enjoyed immunity from UK criminal jurisdiction at the time of Harry’s death was not reached “with any en...

In her new book Rough Justice , the former Old Bailey judge Wendy Joseph KC explores areas where she believes the courts have fallen short over the years — including rape, domestic violence and child cruelty. She does this by taking the reader through four dramatic cases, viewed from her seat on the judge’s bench. Although the people she writes about are not real, everything they say and do is bas...

The challenge for the courts is making the most of new technologies and practices without losing sight of what worked in the past, a justice of the UK Supreme Court said yesterday. In a lecture called Breathing Life into the Law: Achieving Access to Justice in the Modern State , Lady Rose of Colmworth said the best way of achieving this was a blend of creativity and conservatism. “Like Moses and J...

Any move towards withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) would risk damaging the UK’s trading position, a former president of the human rights court argued this week. Robert Spano, now an international business lawyer, was speaking to me on Tuesday evening at a public event sponsored by the law firm Gibson Dunn, where he is a partner. Hours later, the Telegraph reported a c...

Lord Pannick KC is undoubtedly the UK’s leading lawyer in his chosen field, public law. Perhaps best known for winning the Brexit and prorogation challenges that Gina Miller brought against the government in the Supreme Court, he is currently defending the government’s Rwanda asylum policy in the Court of Appeal while representing Boris Johnson in the Commons privileges committee. He and I discuss...

The justice secretary Brandon Lewis said this afternoon he would defend judicial independence “to the hilt”. But, discussing reform of human rights, he stressed that parliament was sovereign. Lewis was speaking at at a meeting arranged by the think tank Policy Exchange at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham. You can listen to the lord chancellor’s remarks by clicking the button at the...

This isn’t a political blog so I’m not going to make any tired references to the cover-up being worse than the crime or history repeating itself as farce. I realise that the current threat from the Omicron variant is no laughing matter. But that, of course, is why it is so important for the prime minister and his government to maintain the confidence of the British people. The leak of a rehearsal...

Baroness Hale spoke yesterday of her “huge admiration” for Israel, a country she has visited at least half a dozen times for judicial exchanges and academic seminars. Her unscripted remarks — which you can listen to by clicking the podcast symbol above — were made after the former president of the UK Supreme Court was made an honorary doctor of philosophy by Bar-Ilan University , near Tel Aviv, fo...

BBC Radio Scotland ran an interview with me this morning (recorded on Friday) about threats to the rule of law. Isobel Fraser asked about references to lefty lawyers by the prime minister and the home secretary. We also discussed the review of judicial review and the UK Internal Market Bill . Joanna Cherry QC was kind enough to mention it on Twitter and I thought listeners outside Scotland might l...

Stephanie Hayward, a barrister specialising in criminal law, interviewed me live yesterday for her Instagram channel @behindthegownbarristers. We spoke mainly about my new book, Enemies of the People? You can watch the entire interview here but I thought it would be useful to post this (slightly edited) audio version so that you can also listen to it as a podcast. This is a public episode. If you'...