I grew up hating judges. It might have been because of the lunch I had with my father in a Dublin restaurant when I was 13, joviality all round until the arrival of a spectral figure whose silent brooding dominated everything thereafter – a high court judge in search of the memory of what socialising had been like. Or maybe it was the fact that the judges were all ex-barristers and these were people I hated even more, pouring into my home town from Dublin, shouting and roaring in court, taking all the best cases, getting drunk, patronising us yokels.
Then 25 years ago I had lunch with Lord Lane, the lord chief justice of England, who was about to confirm that the Birmingham Six were as guilty as, well, all the other "IRA terrorists" who had been randomly thrown in jail for walking into police stations at the wrong time. My contempt for the judicial branch was complete.
Lord Bingham, as lawyers know him, is probably the main reason I have let my prejudices go. The now retired Bingham was in the front line as a senior judge and occupied all the great positions (master of the rolls, lord chief justice, senior law lord). Magnificently, unexpectedly, he has immatured with age, as Harold Wilson said of Tony Benn. His has been the guiding spirit behind a series of judicial decisions that have stood up to the executive in the fields of counterterrorism and public-order policing, while also transforming the law so as to improve the capacity of inquests to do justice, to inhibit the state from forcing starving asylum seekers on to the streets and much else besides.
Written in a jaunty, broad-brush style, this book is an enjoyable excursion through the greatest hits of the common law in general and English law in particular. It reads like the transcript of a parlour game played by a particularly precocious set of undergraduates: what are the 12 best "rule of law" kind of things to have happened since 1200? What are the eight most important features of the rule of law today? (Each gets a short chapter here.) One wishes at times for a little more historical nuance; with Bingham, the constitution often reads like a roll-call of great events that popped out of nowhere to make a marvellous difference.
The contradictions between parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law are rather glossed over (even though he sensibly sees that Parliament needs to trump judicial will) and the danger of the judges interpreting the rule of law in a way that legitimises oppression (stop and search, for example) are simply ignored. But there's only so much immaturing a man in his 70s can do.
Most of all, this book is worth reading for the insight it gives into a special kind of mind, one with a sense of logic and order so compelling that its contents spill on to the page like a musical score or a well-judged poem. Tom Bingham is a Lord Denning of sorts, but one with discipline in place of egoism, a consistent rather than selective sense of right and wrong and a sensible retirement age to make impossible the temptation to go on and on. He has been a key guiding spirit behind the unexpected renaissance that has taken the judges from the nadir of the miscarriage of justice cases to their current position of high public esteem. He will be – already is being – missed.
Conor Gearty is professor of human rights law at LSE and a barrister at Matrix Chambers
