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“... The Privy Council, which will now be responsible for issuing a royal charter setting up a panel to vet the independence of a new press regulator, started licensing books in 1538. In 1557 a royal charter gave the members of the Stationers’ Company a monopoly of printing. In 1588 the anti-episcopal Marprelate Tracts (one of whose authors, John Penry, was executed for publishing them) provoked a system of press licensing which survived in one form or another, though with diminishing effect, until the last decade of the 17th century ...”

“... It’s not too hard today to recognise the sovereign individual, supposed master of his fate and captain of his soul, as a sociopath. The idea of the sovereign state, by contrast, still commands intellectual allegiance in spite of evidence that its day is done. This is not to say that states do not continue to exist which both assert and possess the power to determine what happens inside their borders ...”

“... Q: How many judges does it take to change a light bulb? A: Change? Barely three centuries after the full-bottomed wig went out of fashion, and hardly two centuries after the sartorial demise of the short wig, Her Majesty’s judges are going to sit with bare heads. Well, almost. The short ‘bench’ wig will still be worn on formal occasions such as the Lord Chancellor’s Breakfast; judges sitting on criminal cases will continue to wear it daily; and while the change affects England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will make their own arrangements ...”

“... 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 candidates but which a substantially higher proportion of native-born than immigrant employees can pass is indirectly discriminating against the latter ...”

“... be a remedy here. I wish there were, but we cannot make law . . . As to the case of Sir Charles Sedley’ – fined in 1663 for an offence against public morals – ‘there was something more in that case than shewing his naked body in the balcony; for the case was quod vi et armis he pissed down upon the people’s heads.’ That is the trouble with ...”

“... Beatification, which finally came to Thomas More in 1886, and canonisation, which had to wait until 1935, were only the icing on the commemorative cake. He had had, both during his life and since, a deserved measure of admiration as a scholar, a lawyer, a writer and a politician; for there is much in Robert Bolt’s adulatory A Man for All Seasons which reflects what we know of More ...”

“... In the pocket of my dinner-jacket, because I can’t bring myself to throw it away, is a slip of paper bearing in a neat italic hand the words ‘I expect you have remembered to ask the Bishop to say grace.’ It was passed to me some years ago during pre-dinner drinks at the judges’ lodgings in Lincoln by the butler, who had sensed that, though formally in charge, I was not to the manner born ...”

“... Living originalism? The heart sinks. Is this going to resemble a treatise on secular spirituality or tabloid ethics or some other well-meant oxymoron? To a degree, the despondency is justified. How can you breathe life into a text if its meaning remains what it was in 1787 or 1868? Jack Balkin, who holds one of America’s premier chairs of constitutional law, argues that you can ...”

“... The​ Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore recently outed (or claimed to be outing) the writer of the Neapolitan novels concealed behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. Has the press – or anyone else – any moral right to do this? Is an author’s identity an aspect of her personal privacy, to be disclosed or withheld as she chooses? Or is it information which belongs as much in the public domain as the books she writes? Anonymous and pseudonymous publication has a long history ...”

“... 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 uncontentious and genetically British – is the orthodox narrative that the Australian scholar Marco Duranti sets out to deconstruct ...”

“... of public good.This defence had been long in gestation. The conservative jurist James Fitzjames Stephen had proposed it in his draft criminal code: ‘A person is justified in exhibiting disgusting objects, or publishing obscene books, papers, writings, prints, pictures, drawings, or other representations, if their exhibition or publication is for the ...”

“... and torts. This was the analysis put forward by the criminal lawyer and jurist James Fitzjames Stephen, who was retained by the Jamaica Committee in its endeavour to get Eyre and some of his officers convicted. Its attraction as a workable constitutional theory in a common law polity was instantly recognised by Bagehot and by the end of the century had ...”

“... 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 ...”