Haus Curiosities

David Neuberger, Peter Riddell, Claire Foster-Gilbert

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912208241
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

To the vast majority of the English public, the role of the United Kingdom's Supreme Court has often been distant and incomprehensible, its judges a caste apart from society. The Power of Judges ends this mystery, exploring the fundamental concept of justice and explaining the main functions of the courts, the challenges they face, and the complexity of the judicial system.In this lucid account of the judiciary, David Neuberger and Peter Riddell lead us through an array of topics both philosophical and logistical, including the relationships between morality and law and between Parliament and the judiciary. They explain the effects of cuts in legal aid and shed light on complex and controversial subjects like assisted dying and the complexities of combating mass terrorism while protecting personal liberty. Given that many of these issues span national borders, the book also compares the United Kingdom's legal system with its counterparts in the United States and Germany.Full of insights, The Power of Judges is an informative and accessible account of the United Kingdom's judicial system, its contribution to running the country, and the challenges it faces—including the many threats to its effectiveness.

Dialogue

Rt Hon Lord Neuberger, speaker in this dialogue, was the second president of the Supreme Court, which was opened by Her Majesty the Queen in October 2009 to replace the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. David Neuberger studied Chemistry before working at the merchant bank N. M. Rothschild & Sons from 1970 to 1973, until he entered Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the Bar in 1974. He was made a Queen’s Counsel (QC) in 1987 and became a bencher for Lincoln’s Inn in 1993. His first judicial appointment was as a recorder from 1990 until 1996, when he was appointed a High Court judge in the Chancery Division. He was then the Chancery Supervising Judge for the Midland, Wales and Chester and Western Circuits from 2000 to 2004. In 1999 David chaired the Advisory Committee on the Spoliation of Art (in the Holocaust). Since 2000 he has been a governor of University of the Arts London. In 2003 he became chair of the Schizophrenia Trust, now merged into Mental Health Research UK, of which he is a trustee. He has also led an investigation for the Bar Council into widening access to the barrister profession. In January 2004 Lord Neuberger was appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal. In 2007 he was made a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and was created a life peer as Baron Neuberger of Abbotsbury in the County of Dorset. He was appointed Master of the Rolls in 2010 and then returned to the Supreme Court as president in 2012. David has sat as judge in the most senior Hong Kong court, the Court of Final Appeal, since 2010. David is a member of the Council of Reference of Westminster Abbey Institute.

Rt Hon Peter Riddell has been Commissioner for Public Appointments since April 2016, responsible for ensuring that appointments to boards of public bodies are made on merit after fair and open competition. He was formerly director of the Institute for Government from 2012, where he had previously been a senior fellow at the same time as working for the Detainee Inquiry, a Privy Counsellor panel looking at whether the British Government was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees held by other countries. At the Institute, he co-authored reports on transitions and ministerial effectiveness, and was closely involved in its work on political and constitutional reform. Until mid-2010, Peter was a journalist for nearly 40 years, split between the Financial Times and The Times, at the latter of which he had been a domestic political analyst and commentator. He has been a regular broadcaster, has written seven books and has delivered frequent lectures. He chaired the Hansard Society, a non-partisan charity which promotes understanding of Parliament and representative democracy, for five years until mid-2012. He carried out the triennial review of the Committee on Standards in Public Life for the Cabinet Office in late 2012. He has received two honorary doctorates of literature, is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an honorary fellow of the Political Studies Association, and was one of the first recipients of the President’s Medal of the British Academy. He was appointed to the Privy Council in July 2010 in order to serve on the Detainee Inquiry and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours List.

The text below is a lightly edited version of the dialogue. Additional comments made by David Neuberger and Peter Riddell to expand points made in the original dialogue are enclosed in [square brackets].

Peter Riddell

The series of dialogues of which this, ‘The Power of Judges’, is a part, is entitled ‘In Power?’ I think one of the interesting things which will emerge in our conversation will be: is the word ‘power’ right? Do people actually have a sense of power? I was pleased to be asked to contribute to this dialogue partly because of my experience as director of the Institute for Government. That institute is on the other side of St James’s Park, in another space and geography, and it exists to improve the effectiveness of Government. But when I look at Government, what strikes me is how it sits within different silos. People in British public life belong not to just one establishment, which is the frequent accusation made, but to several establishments, several different power structures, and they don’t talk to each other much. At the Institute for Government, as at Westminster Abbey Institute, people are brought together – not in quite the same way, but both institutes make evident that the language spoken by the Judiciary, the Executive, politicians, the clergy and others is different, and the different groups react and behave in different ways.

This wasn’t always so. Here we are, in this beautiful chapel built by Henry VII. Henry VII wouldn’t have recognised in any respect at all distinctions between, particularly, clergy and lawyers. He wouldn’t have had much time for the Commons certainly, and not always for the Lords. He would regard them as all merged together. Indeed, if we go back just 150 years, the Judiciary was sitting in Westminster Hall. It must have been rather noisy with all the courts meeting there. Even in David Neuberger’s own period when he was a Law Lord, a member of the Appellate Committee in the House of Lords, he sat in a committee room in the House of Lords. It is less than a decade since the legislation was passed to create the Supreme Court on one side of Parliament Square. So while constitutionally there may have been distinctions between the Judiciary and the Legislature, the physical proximity was very strong. Not that long ago, members of the Supreme Court would have given rulings upstairs in a committee room in the Lords in the morning, and in the afternoon spoken on and moved amendments downstairs in the Chamber of the Lords, against the Government of the day. That memorably happened. A lot of the contradictions within the legal system surfaced there, in the Lords.

Today, I’m delighted to introduce David Neuberger, whose career is as an extremely distinguished judge. He was a member of the Appellate Committee when it was sitting over the road in Parliament, on the east side of Parliament Square, before it was replaced by the Supreme Court, on the west side of Parliament Square. Then he became Master of the Rolls and then president of the Supreme Court. He has always been interested in the wider aspects of the Judiciary, diversity and its relationship to the wider citizenship. And those are among the concepts I want to explore.

[First, David, you have filled the highest office a lawyer can achieve. Would you tell us something of yo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Dialogue
• Notes
• Haus Curiosities
• Westminster Abbey Institute