Stephen Sedley

In​ 1944, as Richard Kay records, an optimistic litigant challenged the validity of a Victorian statute under which he was being sued, on the ground that Queen Victoria, like all her predecessors since 1689, had had no title to the throne. The argument, which would have wiped the statute book almost clean, was dismissed without much ceremony; but in 1688 and 1689 it occupied the centre of...

When suicide was decriminalised in 1961, assisting suicide continued to be a crime. This was in part an acceptance of the theological view of suicide as murder, but it was also a recognition of the difficulty in many cases, with the main actor by definition unable to testify, of distinguishing assisted dying from culpable homicide. The simple binary system that resulted, however, failed to take account of cases in which the deceased’s wish to die was explicit, considered and rational, and the need for help in accomplishing it demonstrable.

In March​ 1718, 13-year-old William Murray, the 11th of Viscount Stormont’s 14 children, set off from the family seat at Scone, near Perth, on a pony. The journey to London, which he made alone, took him almost two months, and it is probable that he never saw Scotland again. Although it was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender,...

In 1916 the secretary of the Anti-German Union, Sir George Makgill, a Scottish baronet of extreme right-wing views, brought judicial review proceedings to remove from the Privy Council two wealthy Jewish philanthropists, Sir Ernest Cassel (who had actually converted to Catholicism) and Sir Edgar Speyer, on the ground that, although both were British subjects, they were not British-born. A full court of the King’s Bench, presided over by the chief justice, Lord Reading, was assembled to hear the claim. It was opposed on behalf of the Crown by the attorney-general, F.E. Smith.