A new blog

Law and Lawyers is a new blog. Please let me say from the outset that this blog does not seek to offer legal advice and should not be used for that reason. Anyone with legal problems should seek professional advice. Links to other blogs or websites may be included in posts but I bear no responsibility for the content of such external sites.

The law to be addressed will be mainly that of England and Wales but, occasionally, interesting posts from other jurisdictions will be added. I am particularly interested in criminal law, family law, constitutional law, human Rights, international law. the law of the European Union and civil liberties. Every year new law emerges from Europe, from the European Court of Human Rights, from Parliament, from our own senior courts. Arguably, we have too much law and certainly too much complex law. Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535) wrote of "Utopia" and he had this to say about their law:

"They have but few laws, and such is their constitution that they need not many. They very much condemn other nations, whose laws, together with the commentaries on them, swell up to so many volumes; for they think it an unreasonable thing to oblige men to obey a body of laws that are both of such a bulk, and so dark as not to be read and understood by every one of the subjects.

They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters, and to wrest the laws; and therefore they think it is much better that every man should plead his own cause, and trust it to the judge, as in other places the client trusts it to a counsellor.

Every one of them is skilled in their law, for as it is a very short study, so the plainest meaning of which words are capable is always the sense of their laws. And they argue thus; all laws are promulgated for this end, that every man may know his duty; and therefore the plainest and most obvious sense of the words is that which ought to be put upon them.

That is certainly not the case with modern English law. It is my hope that, from time to time, this blog will throw at least a little light on the laws which govern us and the lawyers who implement those laws.