Stephen Sedley

I used to argue that advocates of the Convention resembled the Brooklyn woman who came out with chicken soup for an apparently dead man in the road, and when a doctor said ‘Lady, it won’t help,’ replied: ‘Mister, it won’t hoit.’ Now, I confess, I am less sure.

For at the common law . . . his fault was not to be wrung out of himself, but rather to be discovered by other means, and other men.

William Blackstone, Commentaries

If you were sitting down today to set out the principles of a good system of criminal justice, with a blank sheet of paper and all the wisdom of hindsight at your disposal, you would probably start, as I would, with...

About ten years ago, bans were imposed by two French municipalities on local funfairs where, for a few francs, revellers had been permitted to shoot a dwarf from a cannon. The official reason was the maintenance of public order, but the regional courts which initially overturned the bans pointed out that the shows were entirely orderly. The real issue was human dignity; but the people whose...

It’s not too hard today to recognise the sovereign individual, supposed master of his fate and captain of his soul, as a sociopath. The idea of the sovereign state, by contrast, still commands intellectual allegiance in spite of evidence that its day is done. This is not to say that states do not continue to exist which both assert and possess the power to determine what happens inside...