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“Never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer” is cross-examination’s golden rule. It means asking just what you need to establish the facts or argument necessary for your case. Described as forensic, lawyers-turned-politicians are over-praised for this skill, often undeservedly so. Political persuasion is about crafting a story resonating with ordinary people, not making clever points to impress judges. Investigations are different: asking questions to which you don’t know the answer is essential. Curiosity is a much-underrated…

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How does the state treat those it has wronged – whether through its actions or failures to act? Badly. Some examples: Blood Contamination The majority of the victims have died while waiting for compensation. Why? “could not in conscience add to the decades-long delays many of you have already experienced due to failures to recognise the depth of your losses. Those delays have themselves been harmful.” Despite some interim payments made in October the judge went on: “My judgement is…

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In September 2019 just after the Supreme Court’s decision on whether the then government’s decision to prorogue Parliament was lawful (it wasn’t), a prolific commentator on legal affairs, a KC no less, wrote this: “As a legal matter, if the Supreme Court says it is the law it is the law. Saying “this is the law” is what it is the Supreme Court’s job to do.” Well done. He went on:  “Johnson and Cummings and the other moral detritus they…

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“The powerful tendency for public discussion of gender issues to drift, inexorably, back to the male point of view.” As on here. And in the media. Take Channel 4 news: after interviewing Maya Forstater, they interviewed men from trans groups and 2 sad trans-identified males. What about other trans people interviewed about a judgment which, in paragraph 248, stated: “we have concluded that a biological sex interpretation would not have the effect of disadvantaging or removing important protection under the…

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Perhaps the biggest irony around the 15+ Netflix drama  “Adolescence” about a 13-year old boy who knifes to death a girl at his school is not that it is being foisted on schools in a collaboration between the government, Netflix and Tender (one of those charities largely funded by the taxpayer – £3.4 million so far) with seemingly no consideration of whether it is suitable educational material, how it is to be taught or discussed, what the impact of it…

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Why is it that the US’s vaunted constitutional protections, separations of powers and independent institutions we have heard so much about over the years have just dissolved like wet tissue? Putting them in a Constitution, in founding documents may make them seem important and venerable. But stripped of all the historical baggage, they are like all procedures. They work because it is assumed that everyone understands their point, acts in good faith and with a modicum of good judgment (or…

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Picture: Coffin from the walls of Kirstall Abbey It is not often we knowingly get to watch the start of a scandal unfold in real time. But this is what’s happening with the Assisted Dying Bill. This is a serious societal change with huge implications for our approach to death, suicide, illness, palliative care, the doctor-patient relationship, society’s taboo against killing and much else. Whatever your views on the substance, something as important and sensitive as this needs the fullest…

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“Nothing in life became him, like the leaving of it.” Substitute “job” for “life” and it is what those leaving an important role should aim for. Not so Helen Pitcher, the now ex-Head of the CCRC whose self-pitying interview about being made a scapegoat for the CCRC’s failures in the Andy Malkinson case can be read here. A summary of the Malkinson case: After publication of the report and in response to the Justice Minister’s view that she needed to…

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