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
A thriller tracing the story of Colonel Georges Picquart, who exposed the truth about the falsified evidence that in 1894 convicted Captain Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason and led to his imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Picquart, head of the Deuxième Bureau, discovered that the memorandum used to convict Dreyfus was the work of another French officer, Major Esterhazy. Picquart was warned to conceal his discovery by his superiors, and himself accused of forgery and court-martialled. The Dreyfus case was one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in nineteenth-century Europe and Harris tells the story with wonderful attention to the historical details.
Antony Lentin, Mr Justice McCardie (1869-1933): Rebel, Reformer, and Rogue Judge
In 1934 the Law Quarterly Review described McCardie as one of the most interesting men in the history of the English Bench. A fellow judge described him as a law reformer of outstanding courage and vision. The Manchester Guardian predicted that McCardie would take his place in the succession of the great common-law judges of England. But today he is largely unknown. Antony Lentin explains why McCardie was so interesting and why it was that, with McCardie in mind, Sir Frank (Lord Justice) Mackinnon observed: ‘He is the best judge whose name is known to the fewest readers of the Daily Mail.’ This is a superb work of legal biography and one that has much to say about the practice of law, the pressure on advocates and judges, and the transience of judicial fame.
Sir Frank Douglas MacKinnon, On Circuit 1924-1937
A contemporary of McCardie who compiled an account of his Circuit experience in the years from his appointment to the High Court Bench until his promotion to the Court of Appeal. For those curious to know what life was like when judges were served by javelin-men and trumpeters, and received magnificent gifts from the sheriff (on one occasion, Mackinnon received a solid silver snuff box). This is a nostalgic book of pre-Second World War life in lodgings. It has great charm and some asperity (such as his dislike, shared with Orwell, of the vogue for aspidistras).
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
This book is a consolation in troubled times. It is about ‘why it is so hard for people to get along … and why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness’. The author’s hope was to make conversations about morality, politics and religion more common, more civil, and more fun, even in mixed company. The book has three parts. The first is about the principle that intuitions come first and reasoning second. The second explores the principle of moral psychology that there is more to morality than harm and fairness. The third is based on the principle that human beings are 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee. We have primate minds with a hivish overlay. It all makes perfect sense.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
‘London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth … Fog everywhere … and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near … Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.’
From its unforgettable beginning Dickens tells the spellbinding story of Jarndyce v Jarndyce, a case so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. First published between 1852 and 1853, and set in around 1827, although not flattering to a learned profession, it has timeless appeal:
‘The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly and consistently maintained through its narrow timings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it.’
Happy reading.
