Stephen Sedley

If an employer​ has a policy or practice of never promoting black or female or Muslim employees, it doesn’t require much legal theory to recognise this as direct racial or sexual or religious discrimination. Nor does it require a great deal of sophistication to recognise that an employer who makes promotion dependent on a test – literacy perhaps – which is applied to all...

The title​ of the book is of course ironic: in spite of the clamour at the end of the Great War, the Kaiser was never tried, much less hanged. As Germany prepared to capitulate, Wilhelm II of Hohenzollern with his staff and family quietly crossed into neutral Holland, from where the Dutch politely but resolutely declined to extradite or expel him. Wilhelm lived on in exile for long enough...

‘The​ United Kingdom played a major part in drafting the convention,’ said the Blair government’s paper introducing the bill that became the 1998 Human Rights Act, ‘and there was broad agreement between the major political parties about the need for it.’ The Panglossian account of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights – that it was essentially...