Stephen Sedley

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 D-Day dodgers’, sung to...

Coke v. Bacon

Stephen Sedley, 27 July 2023

‘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...

The Winding Stair
by Jesse Norman.

Both sides of Edward Coke’s reputation have endured. Not long ago the benchers of the Inner Temple refused to name a new building after him because of his brutal prosecution of Walter Raleigh. Yet Coke’s law reports, many of them his own cases, continue to be uniquely relevant to the modern law governing the use and extent of prerogative powers and much else beside. Francis Bacon is a more elusive character.

Cloudy Horizon: Constitutional Business

Stephen Sedley, 13 April 2023

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.

Letter

For Entertainment Only

3 November 2022

In the 1950s, when the contents of country houses and villas that had been requisitioned during the war were being auctioned off in quantity, my father, a solicitor whose office was in Took’s Court (Cook’s Court in Bleak House) off Fetter Lane, would regularly come home with purchases from the nearby second-hand shop, whose proprietor he knew only as ‘the old lady’. She used to buy job...

See more Show oldest

Here come the judges: The constitution

Conor Gearty, 4 June 1998

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...

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...

More search Options

Browse by Subject