Stephen Sedley

Stephen Sedley is a former judge of the High Court and the Court of Appeal, and visiting professor at Oxford.

Letter

Good Judgment

23 April 2026

There was more than one unintended sequel to the catastrophic adventure of the 1971 Industrial Relations Act, about which Francis FitzGibbon writes (LRB, 23 April). When in 1974 Labour kept its promise to abolish the National Industrial Relations Court, it went the whole hog. In place of the NIRC’s grim office building in Chancery Lane, the newly created Employment Appeal Tribunal was housed...

Not Terminal

Stephen Sedley, 8 May 2025

It’s fourteen years​ since, without warning, my handwriting collapsed. Noting the oral arguments in the Court of Appeal in the final week before I had elected to retire, I found that I could no longer form the letter g. Other letters followed, until by the end of the week I was unable to produce more than a scrawl. Not even a treasured fountain pen could save it. It all became, as...

Letter
Francis FitzGibbon bids an unsentimental goodbye to the immigration and asylum tribunal on which he sat for many years, and records his ‘disgust that the laws it had to apply were becoming an impediment to justice’ (LRB, 24 October). He instances in particular the statutory requirement that ‘every decision-maker must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country’...

Boil the cook: Treasonable Acts

Stephen Sedley, 18 July 2024

According to​ the Great Statute of Treasons, 1352, which is still on the statute book, treason consists of ‘Compassing the Death of the King, Queen, or their eldest Son; violating the Queen, or the King’s eldest Daughter unmarried, or his eldest Son’s Wife; levying War; adhering to the King’s Enemies; killing the Chancellor, Treasurer, or Judges in Execution of their...

Letter

D-Day Dodgers

8 February 2024

Malcolm Gaskill recounts that in 1944 ‘a myth set in that the soldiers fighting in Italy had it easy: they were, according to a popular song, “The D-Day dodgers”’ (LRB, 8 February). Well, not quite. It was the Tory MP Nancy Astor who had declared in a speech that the troops in Italy (my father was one) were ‘dodging D-Day’. In response a sarcastic song, ‘The...

At Sunday mass in my North London parish there was recently imposed a ‘New People’s Mass’. It came suddenly and without warning. One week, we were all enjoying versions of the...

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In a narrow pass

Derek Hirst, 19 November 1992

Stephen Sedley and Lawrence Kaplan seek to map a new course for the post-socialist Left, and to turn attention away from that beguiling but now exploded theme, egalitarianism. The long fixation...

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