“... Connoisseurs of fine ironies will be slapping their thighs at the sight of the Bar and the Government with their teeth sunk in each other’s legs, the former egged on by the judiciary, the latter by Dennis Skinner. It’s a fair guess that three-quarters of the Bar are loyal Tory voters. Yet how many of them, and indeed of their colleagues in the centre and on the left, had understood that Thatcherism is not just a tougher brand of Conservatism? What patrician Tories despise as the mentality of the Grantham grocer (as their parents despised Hitler for his vulgarity rather than his politics) is in truth a gut ideology which has no time and no room for any power élite that claims its status as a matter of right ...”

“... The courtroom process keeps its perennial hold on lovers of drama at all levels. At tabloid level it provides revelations of human depravity which nurture every generation’s belief that standards are sinking to previously unknown depths. At the level of high art it is a crucible in which to purge the dross of events and distil essences of truth. Novelists find courtroom proceedings a valuable device for bringing a story to a head and a conclusion: but in real life a judgment or verdict is far more often a stage in a painful odyssey, or even the start of one, than its resolution ...”

“... When​ the government decided to appeal to the Supreme Court against the High Court’s ruling that ministers could not lawfully use the royal prerogative to leave the EU without express legislative authority, many lawyers, myself included, thought it a hopeless enterprise. A court of three judges – the Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice Sales (who had been standing counsel to the government when at the bar) – had held on cogently reasoned grounds that the prior authority of an Act of Parliament was required ...”

“... In a crowded restaurant a bottle of wine arrives at our table with a note: ‘Por tratar de juzgar a Pinochet y hacer justicia en nuestro país’ – ‘For your efforts to bring Pinochet to trial and to do justice in our country.’ Wherever we go in Chile with him, people recognise Juan Guzmán as the judge who has indicted a series of high-ranking officers for the torture, murder and aggravated kidnapping of more than a hundred victims of the military terror of the 1970s and 1980s ...”

“... same thing. Posner is not ungenerous to the opposition. He writes in praise of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Mill’s philosophical antagonist, whose patrician prose and Nietzschean views he cannot help admiring, at least as a period piece, and whom he ends by trying to recruit: ‘Could it be that intelligent authoritarians and intelligent libertarians are at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... If constitutionalism​ is accorded its natural content as a set of rules delineating and governing the exercise of state power, being for it or against it seems as inconsequential as being for or against the weather. Even the worst-governed states have a constitution in this sense. When, therefore, Martin Loughlin characterises constitutionalism as ‘a theory concerning the role’ of ‘the documentary constitution’, resting its authority on ‘two great pillars’, representative government and the separation of governmental powers, he is consciously adding a good deal ...”

“... Every so often, poking around in the law’s attic for something you need, you come across a piece of legislation or a report of a case which still has enough grass and twigs sticking to it to hint at the life behind it. Researching a case not long ago about public rights of access to Fylingdales Moor, it dawned on me that behind the opaque language of the successive Defence Acts and Military Lands Acts which from the 1840s onwards had handed huge tracts of land to the military for practice and manoeuvres, lay a widespread struggle, in and outside Parliament, to keep the commons open ...”

“... When Germany’s ultimatum – delivered, as the Kaiser had explained, ‘only with the friendliest intentions towards Belgium’ – expired in August 1914, von Emmich’s infantry crossed the frontier in parade-ground order, accompanied by horse-drawn field kitchens with fires burning and army cooks stirring the regimental stew. They don’t wage war like that any more ...”

“... When​ the government decided to appeal to the Supreme Court against the High Court’s ruling that ministers could not lawfully use the royal prerogative to leave the EU, many lawyers, myself included, thought it a hopeless enterprise. A court of three judges – the Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice Sales (who had been standing counsel to the government when at the bar) – had held on cogently reasoned grounds that the prior authority of an Act of Parliament was required ...”

“... The​ United Kingdom has in recent years been blighted by a compensation culture generated by health and safety legislation and human rights laws and promoted by well-paid legal aid lawyers and credulous judges. We know these to be facts because newspapers and electronic media have exposed them fearlessly. David Cameron, when he was prime minister, was so concerned about the situation that he appointed the veteran Tory politician and entrepreneur Lord Young to report on the state of health and safety legislation and ‘the rise of the compensation culture over the last decade ...”

“... In hell​,’ the American law teacher Grant Gilmore wrote, ‘there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.’ This has for a long time been the view of a neoliberal school of legal thought; but the argument of Jonathan Sumption’s 2019 Reith Lectures, delivered in May and June and now issued in book form, is more accommodating ...”

“... When I read for the English Bar in the 1960s, the legal history lecturer stopped when he reached 1649 and explained that he was now moving directly to 1660, because everything that had happened between the trial of the king and the restoration of the monarchy was a nullity. By this simple and efficient process John Cooke, the barrister who prosecuted Charles I, has been airbrushed from history, save by a handful of historians of the trial who have written him off as a hack ...”

“... That wonderful Edward Coke,’ wrote the great Maitland, ‘masterful, masterless man.’ Others prefer the judgment of the Australian judge and historian James Spigelman: Coke’s mind ‘was so narrow and unsubtle, so incapable of jettisoning detail, so often inconsistent, that no one has ever speculated that he wrote the works of Shakespeare ...”

“... There’s an episode of The Wire in which the intellectual drug baron Stringer Bell, trying to launder his gang’s profits by legitimate real estate development, finds the project stalled by bureaucratic delays. He is tactfully advised by his contractor that it takes money in the right place to get things moving. Bell is outraged; but, as the contractor explains, it’s ‘democracy in action ...”