Stephen Sedley

‘That wonderful Edward Coke,’ wrote the great Maitland, ‘masterful, masterless man.’ Others prefer the judgment of the Australian judge and historian James Spigelman: Coke’s mind ‘was so narrow and unsubtle, so incapable of jettisoning detail, so often inconsistent, that no one has ever speculated that he wrote the works of Shakespeare’. That perverse...

If constitutions are to represent a fresh start for a society, they cannot simply be adopted. They require a wide but intangible impetus – what is sometimes called a constitutional moment – that cannot be willed or voted into being.

There are plenty of competent barristers, but Sydney Kentridge was more than this: he was from the start one of those advocates who sense exactly where to pitch anything from a lethal monosyllabic comment to a day-long submission of law. Of the many, often hyperbolic, appreciations of Kentridge’s style cited by Thomas Grant, two seem to me to hit the mark. The future Justice Edwin Cameron, watching Kentridge’s defence in the trial of the dean of Johannesburg under the Terrorism Act, witnessed a cross-examination that was ‘meticulously detailed, but mesmerising’ – a combination far more difficult to achieve than it sounds. Many years later, Nelson Mandela, always precise in his choice of words, described Kentridge’s courtroom manner as ‘understated, controlled and relentlessly rational’.