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| Human
Traffic
By Michael Mansfield
QC, Head of Tooks Chambers
“For eight years I have battered
the criminal justice system to get it to change. And it was only
when we started to introduce special ASB laws, we really made a
difference. And I now understand why: the system itself is the problem.
We are trying to fight 21st-century crime - ASB, drug-dealing, binge-drinking,
organised crime - with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived
in the time of Dickens.”
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| Criminal
Legal Aid – Government Induced Demand?
By Ed Cape and
Richard Moorhead, Professor of Criminal Law and Professor of Law
In March
2005 we completed a report for the Legal Services Commission, which
identified the factors, which have led to escalating criminal legal
aid costs over the past decade. Our findings undermine the widespread
perception that the legal profession is primarily responsible for
this increase. |
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Is outside
ownership really a problem?
By Paul A. Grout, Professor of Political Economy,
Head of Economics Department, Centre for Market and Public Organisation
The government
argue that outside ownership will bring in new money and new ideas
into the profession, and that large firms will have reputations
to protect that will improve the efficiency and quality of legal
services. |
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…The
expert witness and the lawyers
By James Badenoch Q.C., 1 Crown Office Row,
Temple, London, Chairman, The Expert Witness Institute
An expert witness who has diligently
formed an opinion, and honestly expressed it, is not guilty of impropriety,
and cannot be professionally culpable for the fact alone that his
opinion is not accepted at trial. |
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Inaugural
Lord Hooper Lecture: Cherie Booth QC explains urgent need for human
rights education
By Sarah Fenlon, External Relations Support
Officer, Citizenship Foundation
Cherie Booth QC emphasised the urgent
need for public legal education in the benefits of human rights
law, at the inaugural Hooper Lecture last week. Speaking in her
capacity as trustee for the Citizenship Foundation, she professed
that people should be reminded of why human rights matter: “so
that we can put human rights back where they deserve to be –
in the centre of our lives.” |
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Trial by jury: Struggling to survive?
By Peter Thornton QC, Head of Doughty Street
Chambers
50 years ago in one of the first
editions of the Criminal Law Review a senior judge wrote: “I
cannot bring myself to believe that there are any persons other
than the inmates of a lunatic asylum who would vote in favour of
the abolition of trial by jury in serious cases.” |
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| Are
lawyers falling short in mediation?
By Professor Karl Mackie, barrister, chief
executive, CEDR
“All members of the legal
profession who conduct litigation should now routinely consider
with their clients whether their disputes are suitable for ADR",
Lord Justice Dyson in Halsey v Milton Keynes NHS Trust, 2004. |
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| Terrorism
and the statute book
By Dr Eric Metcalfe, Barrister and Director
of Human Rights Policy at Justice.
‘Prediction is very difficult’,
wrote the physicist Neils Bohrs, ‘especially about the future’.
It is particularly difficult to analyse legislation that –
at the time of writing – is only midway through its passage
through Parliament. That said, it is very likely that by the time
you read this there will be a new Terrorism Act on the statute books.
If passed, it will be the second piece of counter-terrorism legislation
passed in 2005 and the fourth such Act in five years. Like legislation
on criminal justice and immigration, counter-terrorism is on the
verge of becoming a perennial feature of the parliamentary calendar. |
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Witness Familiarisation: welcome relief for witnesses
Gill
Davies, Solicitor, of Bond Solon discusses the issues highlighted
by recent cases and the new Guidance issued by the Bar Council
Over the last eighteen months,
the courts have had the three opportunities (two criminal and one
civil) to consider the acceptable boundaries for witness familiarisation
(R v Momodou [2005] EWCA Crim 177, R v Salisbury – May 2004,
Chester Crown Court, Transcript no. T20037200 and Ultraframe (UK)
Ltd v Fielding and others [2005] EWHC 1638 (Ch)). |
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Cheap
Justice – What’s the Cost?
By Eve Naftalin, who is on the committee of Young Legal Aid Lawyers,
and is a pupil barrister at Tooks Chambers
With the on-going ‘Fundamental Legal Aid Review,’ the
government’s message is clear – it wants us to provide
an efficient and fair legal system but it is not prepared to invest
in it. |
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