What are judges for? 
Conor Gearty
The first Catholic to become Lord Chief Justice of England was Charles Russell, in 1894, a man whose benignly Victorian image looked down on me almost every day of my teenage life. He was by a long way my Dublin secondary school’s most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall. I ate and drank with Russell for five years, often wondering what he was for and how on earth he had got to where he had from our common starting point in a Dublin suburb.
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Conor Gearty, Rausing Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights and professor of human rights law at the LSE, has written a number of books on terrorism and human rights.
Other articles by this contributor:
Airy-Fairy · Blunkett’s Folly
A Misreading of the Law · Why didn’t Campbell sue?
How did Blair get here? · the folly of the impending war
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