Stephen Sedley

An appeal, you might think, is an argument that a lower court has got it wrong. Whether you would consider it to be ‘a piece of linguistic shorthand which accepts the existence of a penumbra of uncertainty in order to achieve universal comprehensibility at a very low level of exactitude’ is more doubtful; but what these authors seem to have in mind is that even a right of appeal...

Q: How many judges does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Change?

Barely three centuries after the full-bottomed wig went out of fashion, and hardly two centuries after the sartorial demise of the short wig, Her Majesty’s judges are going to sit with bare heads. Well, almost. The short ‘bench’ wig will still be worn on formal occasions such as the Lord Chancellor’s...

On 11 October 1865, a crowd of poor black Jamaicans burned down the Morant Bay courthouse and killed 18 people, most of them white and one the local chief magistrate, who had just had them fired on by soldiers after a reading of the Riot Act. The governor of the island, Edward Eyre, on the advice of his military commander and his law officers, decreed martial law in the county where Morant...

There are some who will have taken a sadistic pleasure in the failure of the recent attempt by the News of the World’s undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, the ‘fake sheikh’, to prevent George Galloway from publishing photographs of him on the internet. But those who are keen to see privacy protected by law were making a mistake if they cheered or jeered at the court’s refusal to protect Mahmood from the kind of exposure to which his paper regularly subjects others. The real coup would have been if the court had accepted his counsel’s argument that the unwanted publicity violated Mahmood’s right to respect for his private life and Mahmood v. Galloway had become authority for a free-standing right of privacy.