Features

Battle lines are drawn  

My party political allegiances remained pretty constant until the day I found myself driving behind a car that had a sticker on its rear windscreen.  Generally, I fi nd these proclamations very annoying. Top of my hate list is “Drive Carefully! Baby on Board!” Whenever I see this particular command, it coincides with a car that is being driven badly in some way – the last one cut me up having undertaken my car at high speed on the M4 – and has no baby in the vehicle at all, unless it has been placed in the boot. However, on this day of my political metamorphosis, I found the rear sticker not only completely failed to irritate me but actually expressed a thought that had been germinating in my head for some time. It read, simply and succinctly: “Don’t Vote! It Only Encourages Them.” 

Rain, rain, go away.... Toby Craig reviews a wet, windy and eventful month for those in Westminster.  

It never rains but it pours... 

Andy Thornton explains the role played by the Mock Trial Competition in opening up the Bar as a career for so many – and the funding issues now faced.  

It is the fourth of December and the line-up of this year’s Bar National Mock Trial final has just been announced. 2,000 students in 160 schools across the UK, helped by 300 barristers and advocates and assessed by 90 judges have been reduced to 16 teams ready for the final showdown in Cardiff Crown Court on 22 March 2014. Please come and watch. 

Anne Fairpo, from the Bar Council’s IT Panel, on cybercrime and how members of the Bar should deal with identity theft.  

From time to time, your Bar IT Panel offer practical tips on how to handle certain issues of the day. This time around it is cybercrime or as expressed in more mundane terms, identity theft. In other words, someone’s pinched all the content from my website and is using it on their own website; they are pretending to be me; what do I do? 

David Thomas QC, LLD was the country’s authority on the law and practice of sentencing. Sir David Maddison reflects upon his life and how he revolutionised the courts’ approach to sentencing.  

David Thomas’s death on 30th September, 2013 marked the passing of the pre-eminent authority on the law and practice of sentencing in the criminal courts of England and Wales. His name was and remains known to almost every practitioner, magistrate, Recorder and judge dealing with criminal cases. He will be greatly missed by his many friends and admirers in legal and academic circles. 

Paul Marshall on Andrew Mitchell MP v News Group Newspapers Ltd and the stripping of judicial discretion.  

  “‘Sit down!’ roars the captain. “Ye sot and swine, do ye know what ye’ve done? Ye’ve murdered the boy!’  

 Mr Shuan seemed to understand; for he sat down again and put his hand to his brow.  

 ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he brought me a dirty pannikin’  

 At that word, the captain and I and Mr Riach all looked at each other for a second with a kind of frightened look….”  

The atrocities committed during the Rwandan genocide left lasting psychological scars on the majority of its survivors, making the drafting of its mental health legislation all the more poignant, says Laura Davidson.  

In 2013 I was asked by the Rwandan government to draft the country’s first mental health legislation and to advise on its mental health policy. Consequently I took a sabbatical from my practice at the Bar and set off for East Africa. 

Francis FitzGibbon QC and Abigail Bright examine how human rights law has been articulated and interpreted by the European Courts, the United Kingdom Courts and the British Government, and the political reality of “Bringing Rights Home”.  

Our law is saturated with human rights principles. It is almost impossible to practise law of any kind without at least a passing knowledge of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). (The practice of politics is another matter.) The Act has had a palpable impact on relations between the State and the citizen in almost every sphere of interaction. 

Job title 

Joint Senior Clerk, 7KBW 

7KBW is a leading set of chambers with experts specialising in the full breadth of commercial law. 

The Calm Before The Storm 

Despite initial skirmishes, the phoney war between the publicly funded Bar and the Ministry of “Justice” continues while we wait for the real conflict to begin. Is the Public Defender scheme the plan B of which my mandarin friend warned me or is it yet another smokescreen to cover even more awful shenanigans deep in the Whitehall bunker? Andrew, our Senior Clerk, who hides a twitchy personality under a mask of assurance and confidence, came upstairs for our weekly Headmaster’s chat. It had long ago ceased to be enjoyable and now is simply a list of actual, putative, impending or imaginary crises.