Features

Drinking in the Last Chance Saloon; Toby Craig asks if press regulation is now an inevitability.  

Party conferences and a bit of feng shui in the form of a pretty unexciting reshuffle grabbed some of the headlines in recent weeks. Shailesh Vara replaces Helen Grant as Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Justice, as she moves to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. A former solicitor, Vara’s brief will include legal aid and regulation. In the long run though, it’s just yesterday’s fish and chip paper (a position to which WW continues to aspire). But there is one story which simply refuses to go away and which continues to catch WW’s eye. That is the vexed question of who gets to say what can be written on tomorrow’s fish and chip paper? 

Susan Blake, Julie Browne and Stuart Sime
ISBN: 978-0-19-967646-0 
25 April 2013
Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Price: £34.99
Also available as an eBook  

The importance of this handbook to the integration of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) within our civil justice system cannot be overstated. Similar ADR texts have been published in the past (most notably A Practical Approach to ADR (OUP)) by the same authors, on which elements of the current handbook are clearly based. However, no other ADR text has received such high profile endorsement - by Lord Justice Jackson, the Judicial College, the Civil Justice Council and the Civil Mediation Council.  

With the assistance of an eminent Editorial Advisory Board comprising predominately judges and barristers and some practising mediators, the handbook is intended to inform litigants, lawyers and judges alike about the benefits of ADR in the hope that it will become more readily deployed in the context of civil litigation. Given the broad target audience, the book assumes little knowledge, and contains both broad overview chapters with useful ancillary information (for example on Part 36 and DBAs), as well as specialist chapters (for example on the roles and responsibilities of lawyers and parties to ADR (chapter 4), and ethics for lawyers (chapter 6)). 

Job title
Head of Chambers, Mansfield Chambers 

Mansfield Chambers is a new chambers whose publicly funded practitioners defend the civil and human rights of individuals and groups of people 

What have been some of the highlights of your career?
The cases that have had national interest and importance, primarily those that have taken on the system and brought about seismic change. One example is the Stephen Lawrence case. The Macpherson Report made 77 recommendations for change in the Met. These changes were far reaching. And what Mrs Lawrence, now Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, has done is to show that ordinary individuals could ask all the right questions, and get a lot of them answered. She also periodically summoned the political leaders and police to meetings to ask them what they had done – in effect to hold them to account. 

The Blair Government dismantled our legal system overnight. The present Government has installed a politician as Lord Chancellor. Sir Stephen Sedley examines the consequences and warns of government’s growing practice of kite-flying.  

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. 

David Wurtzel reviews The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht, currently running at the Duchess Theatre.  

Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui —written in 1941 but only performed after his death—does not come round very often. This Chichester Festival transfer is all the more welcome as it arrives with a brilliant cast headed by the great Henry Goodman, last seen as the father of The Winslow Boy. It sits happily in the intimate setting of the Duchess Theatre and builds to a terrific climax after a slow start. 

James Potts looks at the growing opportunities for barristers in the Far East and reports on the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators’ International Arbitration Conference, held earlier this year in Malaysia  

For me, the skyscraper cities of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur feel like gateways to the future. Since first coming to South East Asia when my chambers set up an international office in Singapore in early 2013, I have loved the sense of ambition, entrepreneurship and enthusiasm that propels this booming region. 

This year’s Young Bar Conference was always going to be a lively one. Max Hardy reports.   

Joy is a word very little heard in the Inns of Court and Crown Court robing rooms these days and a sentiment still less felt. It took Lord Justice Moses, as so often before, in a barnstorming speech to the Young Bar Conference on Saturday 5 October, to remind us all what being a barrister is really all about. 

Jane Hoyal was named Legal Aid Barrister of the Year at the recent LALY awards. Carol Storer shares the story behind her nomination and also that of the LALY newcomer of the year  

The Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year Awards are now in their eleventh year. At a ceremony at the Globe Theatre on 2 July, the winners of the ten awards were announced. Lord Justice Andrew McFarlane presented the trophies and John Howard, former BBC journalist, compered the evening. 

Martin Canny explains recent case law on CPR 17.4(2) and the interaction with the Latent Damage Act 1986  

Building work on Mr Bala Perampalam Chandra’s ill-fated Manchester hotel development project commenced in October 2001, ran significantly over budget in 2002 and came to an abrupt halt in August 2003 when his company’s financiers called in their loans and appointed receivers. Thereafter, his situation worsened as he was fixed with a significant element of the cost overruns incurred after the original contractors were re-appointed to complete the project, in addition to the sums he had personally guaranteed. 

Robert Francis QC considers what work there is for counsel at public inquiries  

On coming to the Bar most of us did not foresee the need to exercise our newly found skills by pushing post-it notes to another barrister suggesting questions for him or her to ask. Yet that appears to be the fate of many instructed to appear for a core participant at a public inquiry. Another activity at some inquiries seems to be careful self positioning near Counsel to the Inquiry for the benefit of the TV cameras.