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