Stephen Sedley

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’.

Everyone​ knows that Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asked an Old Bailey jury in 1960 whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book they would want their wives or servants to read. The jury – which included three women – is said to have laughed. Its acquittal of Penguin on a charge of violating the newly minted Obscene Publications Act 1959 is widely regarded as a turning point...