Ashes and sparks essays on law and justice

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: Part I. History: 1. Victors' justice; 2. Above it all; 3. Reading their rights; 4. From victim to suspect; 5. Farewell sovereignty; 6. No law at all; 7. The sound of silence; 8. The spark in the ashes; 9. Wringing out the fault; 10. Everything and nothing; 11. Skulls and crossbones; Part II. Judgery: 12. Justice miscarried; 13. The Guildford Four; 14. Declining the brief; 15. Big lawyers and little lawyers; 16. Parliament, government, courts; 17. Judges in lodgings; 18. Mice peeping out of oakum; 19. Justice in Chile; 20. Never do anything for the first time; 21. Rarely pure and never simple; 22. Law and plumbing; 23. The laws of documents; Part III. Justice: 24. The right to know; 25. The moral economy of judicial review; 26. Policy and law; 27. Responsibility and the law; 28. The Crown in its own courts; 29. Human rights -- who needs them?; 30. Fundamental values -- but which?; 31. Overcoming pragmatism; 32. Sex, libels and video-surveillance; 33. This beats me; 34. Public inquiries: a cure or a disease?; 35. Human rights: a 21st century agenda; 36. Are human rights universal, and does it matter?; 37. Bringing rights home: time to start a family?; 38. The three wise monkeys visit the marketplace of ideas.

"As a practising barrister, the Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Sedley wrote widely on legal and non-legal matters, and continued to do so after becoming a judge in 1992. This anthology contains classic articles, previously unpublished essays and lecture transcripts. To each, he has added reflections on what has transpired since or an explanation of the British legal and political context that originally prompted it. Covering the history, engineering and architecture of the justice system, their common theme relates to the author's experiences as a barrister and judge, most notably in relation to the constitutional changes which have emerged in the last twenty years in the United Kingdom"--