The Secret Barrister's Top Book Recommendations

The Secret Barrister

This book is cited as mandatory reading for all prospective law students at every law school in the country, but I would go further and decree it compulsory for all politicians and indeed anybody with any interest in public life. [source]

Jonathan Sumption

It’s essentially a basic introduction to the social and political functions of law in modern Britain, which is addressed to non-lawyers. [source]

Max Mosley

What’s interesting about The Rule of Law is that it’s written by someone who was until very recently the UK’s most senior judge, Lord Bingham. It’s comforting because it shows that the highest level of the judiciary is really interested in the liberty of the individual and freedom in all its various guises. It’s also got all sorts of fascinating little pieces in it. For example, he criticises the way in which the Americans put certain prisoners outside the reach of their courts in Guantanamo Bay and mentions that the executive in England was doing exactly the same thing, putting prisoners beyond the reach of the courts, more than 300 years ago. But then there was an act of parliament to stop it, the Habeas Corpus Amendment Act of 1689. The book is a general look at aspects of the law which effectively guarantee the freedom of the individual. The rule of law is one of the two great pillars of democracy, the other, obviously, being the vote. But it’s probably more important than the vote, because the vote is only once in a while, but the rule of law determines the rules which everyone, including the authorities, must follow on a daily basis and is the greatest guarantee of freedom. So, it’s a very important book [source]

The Secret Barrister

This novel is as impeccably researched as you would expect given the author, which pleases the legal pedant in me, but its greater achievement still is its illustration of the humanity beating throughout the justice system. [source]

Selina O'Grady

Ian McEwan is the subtlest of the New Athiests. Most of his novels show that we, as humans, just as we need to live in groups, have a desperate desire to make meaning. Many neo-atheists fail to understand that religion is quite a good way of doing this. Stupid though its beliefs might be, nonetheless it does give us a meaning, which we so desperately need. What’s interesting about The Children Act is that McEwan poses two different ways of making meaning. One is the religious way, and the other is the anti-heroine’s way. She is a high court judge and her way of making meaning is through culture, through playing Bach, through reading, through her beautiful flat with its lovely walnut tables etc. But it’s also through love. As a family court judge, she has to deal with a lot of cases brought up by the opposition between religious fundamentalists and the English secular state. So she has to deal with a case of an orthodox Jewish husband who wants his daughters to be brought up religiously and his wife, who wants them to go to a secular school where they will learn to be lawyers or teachers. Then she has a case of a Catholic family who have Siamese twins and are prepared to let them both die, because if an operation is done, you will deliberately be killing one of them, which is against their faith. She has quite a few cases like that. The case that is at the heart of this book is of a 17-year old boy who is a Jehovah’s Witness, as his parents are. He has leukemia and will die unless he gets a blood transfusion. But Jehovah’s Witnesses do not allow this. You’d think that given McEwan is a New Atheist, this would be a story which is totally unsympathetic to such fundamentalism, but, on the contrary, he is able to show that this, also, is a way of living together and of finding meaning. The lives of the parents of this boy were falling to bits before they discovered this particular religion. The father was drinking too much, he was abusive to his wife, he’d lost his job and so on. Then these two polite young men from America knock on the door and the parents discover a community and a meaning and the father starts running a business. This religion has done them a lot of good, despite the fact that they are actually prepared to let their son die. And the wonderful thing is that the high court judge rules against them, and they are so happy, because they had to follow the beliefs of their religion and yet, of course, they wanted their son to live. She allows them to get out of that dilemma. [source]