Features

Research suggests lawyers need to engage more with their personal morality, but what makes a virtuous professional? Mary Cowe considers the development of practical wisdom at the Bar  

During my undergraduate law degree, Lawyer’s Ethics was an optional paper assessed via a two- rather than three-hour exam, and described as a ‘half-course’: cue much hilarity from philosophy student friends about the obvious dearth of ethical proscriptions on lawyers, if there was so little to study it couldn’t fill a whole module. 

With an encyclopaedic knowledge of criminal law, intellectual rigour and practitioner focus, Professor David Ormerod QC is driving ambitious law reform. David Wurtzel meets the universally respected Law Commissioner  

I met with Professor David Ormerod QC, one of the four Law Commissioners, in a tiny room in the Ministry of Justice building. 

With the formal process of disengagement about to begin, Mark Hatcher examines the challenges faced in converting a huge corpus of EU law and delivering Brexit  

Brexit continues to dominate life at Westminster.  

Dermot Feenan explores the place of compassion in legal practice  

The Family Law Bar Association obituary of Sir Nicholas Wall, formerly President of the Family Division, stated Sir Nicholas was a compassionate judge who ‘thought and cared deeply about the outcome of his cases’ – a reminder that justice and compassion are not seen to be necessarily incompatible. There are many reasons why compassion has a role to play in practice. 

Benchmark your budding best practice: putting mental health firmly on the chambers agenda is the right thing to do and benefits the bottom line
 

With International Women’s Day in March and the new Gender Pay Gap Regulations in force from April, what better time to let you know about the Barristers Lean in Circle? Eleena Misra reports  

Social collective consciousness around the experience of women in society, and not just at the Bar, is increasing.  

As the IICSA launches under its fourth chair, David Wolchover and Anthony Heaton-Armstrong ask how radically the Jay Review has reined in its objectives in wake of criticisms about deficit of due process  

Coming at a time of mounting public disquiet over the actions and management of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), the mysterious resignations of its third chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, its leading counsel, Ben Emmerson QC, and other legal staff gave replacement chair, Professor Alexis Jay, pause to take stock.  

Greater Manchester Law Centre has opened against the odds and is the third new centre to join the legal aid network post-LASPO. Barristers were integral to its success and John Nicholson outlines the journey – urging the Bar to join the wider campaign for law centres  

Ken Loach’s I Daniel Blake  paints a clear picture of Britain today.  

Money or property transferred pursuant to an illegal transaction is recoverable following the seminal case of Patel v Mirza. Nicholas Strauss QC examines the case and its implications in the first of a two-part feature  

Most lawyers remember, even if little else, Lord Mansfield’s dictum in 1775 ‘ex turpi causa non oritur actio... potior est conditio defendentis ’ and many are aware of the ensuing 240 years of chaotic case law resulting, as Lord Sumption has said, from the courts’ distaste for applying their own rule.