Stephen Sedley

After six years as a judge – and, going by some of his judgments, a good judge too – Jonathan Sumption has returned to the theme of the deference owed by law to politics. It is his bad luck to have done so at a moment when the UK’s political process, both in and outside Parliament, has been in functional meltdown and moral decline, while both his own court and the lower courts have remained a source of constitutional principle and political stability.

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...