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“... The legal process, at least in English law, is a quite inadequate instrument for arriving at the truth about a crime. This is not necessarily an adverse comment. There is justification for requiring that if the state accuses a citizen of a crime it must prove it in an adversarial process to the full satisfaction of at least ten jurors. And this is why criminal trials are not designed to arrive at anything so baffling or protean as the truth: their sole purpose, it has been said, is to answer the question ‘Howzat?’ Paul Foot’s question, who killed Carl Bridgewater? was not the question before the jury which in 1979 at Stafford convicted three men and a boy of shooting in cold blood a 13-year-old lad who had evidently stumbled on a burglary at Yew Tree Farm in Staffordshire in the course of his newspaper round ...”

“... 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 the political and constitutional stage ...”

“... The United Kingdom is a good place in which to assemble a book of sceptical essays about human rights, but was 2001 a good year in which to do it? True, by then Scotland and Wales had operative devolution statutes which obliged their Governments to observe the European Convention on Human Rights in all they did; and some interesting decisions had already been thrown up north of the border ...”

“... The absurdity of ex-judge James Pickles is not that, the son of a mayor of Halifax and himself an Oxford graduate, he rails endlessly against the domination of the Bench by the Oxbridge upper middle class. There’s nothing wrong with being a traitor to one’s class. As the left-wing QC D. N. Pritt told the right-wing Labour leader Ernest Bevin, it was the only thing the two of them had in common ...”

“... Anyone​ who looks back today on the bitter row which erupted less than twenty years ago over the proposal to replace the House of Lords by a Supreme Court for the United Kingdom may wonder not only why anyone should have opposed the move but how it was that the upper chamber of the legislature had become the country’s final court of appeal in the first place ...”

“... The​ law of England and Wales – Scotland’s law is not in all respects the same – has come a long way in my 82 years. Absurdly and cruelly, until the 1961 Suicide Act was passed it was a crime to kill yourself. While those who succeeded were beyond the law’s reach, those who tried and failed could be sent to jail. In the 1920s the home secretary had to release a Middlesbrough woman with fourteen children who had been given three months in prison for trying to kill herself ...”

“... Ask​ a British lawyer which case they particularly associate with Sydney Kentridge and they are likely to say the Steve Biko inquest. Biko was the young leader of the Black Consciousness movement who in 1977 was tortured and beaten to death over a period of days by members of the South African security police who then, with the connivance of police doctors, lied their way through the inquest conducted by the chief magistrate of Pretoria, Marthinus Prins ...”

“... Although it is unusual, there is nothing novel about a member of the Bar being appointed directly to the UK’s highest court. When the highest court was the appellate committee of the House of Lords, appointments to it were occasionally made in this way, sometimes to good effect. Among the last, now more than half a century ago, were James Reid QC, a Scottish Tory MP who, as Lord Reid, became one of the best judges of the postwar years, and Cyril Radcliffe QC, a distinguished public servant and barrister ...”

“... Writers on the British constitution have always faced the problem that, contrary to what Mr Podsnap thought, it cannot simply be held up to the light and admired. The constitution is simultaneously a description of how, for the moment, we are governed and a prescriptive account of how we ought to be governed. In both respects (the former much more than the latter) it undergoes constant change; and there are concerns, highlighted by the radical changes currently being made to the legal aid system, that the process may be accelerating into a critical and damaging phase ...”

“... It will soon be two hundred years since Napoleon, as First Consul, appointed four not especially distinguished lawyers to sit down and codify the entire heterogeneous mass of French civil law. They were appointed in August 1800 and by February 1801 had produced and published a complete draft of the Civil Code. After taking the views of the judges and the Tribunal, Napoleon chaired nearly half of the 123 subsequent redrafting sessions of the Conseil d’Etat, some lasting from noon to dawn, repeatedly insisting that detailed prescriptions would be self-defeating; that the right method was to set out the goals the courts were to achieve ...”

“... Working​ in 2010 on a knotty judgment about the power of the home secretary to include additional criteria in immigration rules that she had previously laid before Parliament as required by statute, something clicked in my memory. Four centuries earlier, in 1611, in a decision known as the Case of Proclamations, it had been ruled that ‘the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm … The King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him ...”

“... We are accustomed to finding that we have been lied to. To insure ourselves against such deceptions we repeat the mantra that we don’t believe everything we read in the newspapers. There have been, and must still be, parts of the world where the reputation of the press is such that people don’t believe anything they read in the newspapers: in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s nobody believed that US aircraft were dropping cluster-bombs and napalm on Vietnam because the official newspaper reported daily that they were ...”

“... In June last year, the lord chancellor, Lord Irvine, was dismissed in a cabinet reshuffle. It was announced, not to Parliament but by press release, that his office was not to be filled and that his department was to become part of the Department for Constitutional Affairs, headed by a newly appointed minister, Lord Falconer. Of the expected ministry of justice there was no sign ...”

“... It has taken 12 years of Thatcherism to disrupt the extraordinary complacency of the British about then civil liberties and their constitution. Our constitutional arrangements have never been much more than a matter of convention, and what passes for constitutional law has generally been a Panglossian description of the way things are. Our liberties are largely the product of a carry-over into the statism of the 19th and 20th centuries of procedures (notably jury trial) and rights (notably the integrity of person and property) created in an earlier period by a judiciary concerned to consolidate the transfer of power from monarch to entrepreneur ...”

“... So, then,’ says a founding father, quill poised, to the founding fathers around him in Gary Larson’s cartoon, ‘Would that be “Us the people” or “We the people”?’ If deciding what to write is tough, interpreting what gets written is tougher. Turgid texts need unravelling; obscure provisions need deciphering; occasional nonsense needs correcting; perfectly clear texts may be impossible to apply to novel situations ...”