According to Clarendon, Sir John Kelyng (pronounced ‘Keeling’) was ‘a person of eminent learning, eminent suffering, never wore his gown after Rebellion, and was always in gaol’. As a judge,...
In his slim book The Prince (published 1532, written in 1513), Niccolò Machiavelli made his now notorious assertion that the prince who hopes to succeed must learn ‘how not to...
Sir Thomas More (1478-1535): Henry VIII’s Chancellor, Erasmus’ intellectual sparring partner, Tyndale’s trenchant critic, the author of the dreamy Utopia (1516), canonised by Pope Pius XI and declared the patron...
A nose can be a curious thing: so too causation. I In his Pensées (1669), published from an array of notes following his death, Blaise Pascal expressed a characteristically interesting view...
John Rawls (1921–2002) is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In his classic work of high liberalism, A Theory of Justice (1971), he devised one of the greatest...
This week’s blog contains a few suggestions for summer reading. Sun, sea and law: what more could you want for a perfect holiday? Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy...
July 1916. Britain is at war. The detonation of 19 charges buried in mines dug by British tunnelling units under the German trenches has recently marked the beginning of a...
Even black-letter law is not limited to words on a printed page: beneath and behind statutory language, values and principles which are often nowhere to be seen in the statute’s...
In a previous blog post, Alex du Sautoy and Vincent Scully considered the Supreme Court’s decision in R (Black) v Secretary of State for Justice [2017] UKSC 81 (‘No smoke...
Section 2(2) and (3) of the Criminal Justice Act 1987 (‘CJA 1987’) empower the Director of the Serious Fraud Office (‘the SFO’) to give notice in writing requiring a person...