Lawyers

Friday

Rory Sutherland

My points-based system for choosing our leaders

Our esteemed London editor was once excoriated for saying that the public had had enough of experts. "The people of this country have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong." His remark sits within a fine conservative tradition: there is William F. Buckley, who stated: "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty." There is Thomas Sowell, who wrote: "Intellectuals are people whose end products are intangible ideas…Whether their ideas turn out to work... is another question entirely." And of course there is Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to read PPE at Oxford.

points

Tuesday

Sean Thomas

AI will kill all the lawyers

From our UK edition

It feels, pleasingly, like a scene from a cerebral James Bond film, or perhaps an episode of Slow Horses. I am in a shadowy corner of a plush, buzzy Soho members’ bar. A mild December twilight is falling over London. Across the table from me sits an old acquaintance, a senior English barrister, greying, quietly handsome, in his mid fifties. And he wants to speak anonymously, because what he is about to say will earn the loathing of his entire profession. Let’s call him James. I’ve known him for a few years, and over these years we’ve discussed all kinds of things, from politics to architecture to the misfortunes of Chelsea FC. We’ve also discussed technology and AI. James’s views of AI were always like his politics: centrist, clever, moderate, sceptical.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Wonderfully corny: Burlesque, at the Savoy, reviewed

From our UK edition

Inter Alia, a new play from the creators of Prima Facie, follows the hectic double life of Jess, a crown court judge, played by Rosamund Pike. As a high-flying lawyer with a family to care for, she knows that ‘having it all’ means ‘doing it all’. When not in court, she skivvies non-stop for her indolent husband and her useless son, who telephones her at work to ask why his Hawaiian shirt isn’t in the fridge where he left it. She races home, finds the shirt, irons it back and front, and then starts to prepare supper for eight guests. Husband and son pretend to help by Frisbeeing the dinner plates around the kitchen and tossing pots of taramasalata to each other. A spillage of gunk lands on the kitchen floor and Jess promptly kneels down and wipes it clean.

Thursday

Will Moore

Chambers of horrors, the ‘Dubai-ification’ of London & the enduring obsession with Diana

From our UK edition

37 min listen

This week: the left-wing radicalism of Garden CourtGarden Court Chambers has a ‘reassuringly traditional’ facade befitting the historic Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the heart of London’s legal district. Yet, writes Ross Clark in the cover article this week, ‘the facade is just that. For behind the pedimented Georgian windows there operates the most radically effective cell of left-wing activists in Britain’. Ross argues that cases taken on by Garden Court lawyers raise questions of impartiality. Is this just another example of ‘law’s expanding empire’ over the domain of elected politicians, as former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption has warned? The Spectator’s editor, and former Justice Secretary, Michael Gove joined the podcast to discuss.

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Trump and his lawyers take on the Syndicate

Who has better lawyers: Donald Trump or the Syndicate? The fate of the election, and hence the fate of the country, may well come down to the answer to that question.  By “the Syndicate” (what I sometimes call “the Committee”), I of course mean the shadowy board of overseers that controls the Democratic Party and, by extension, the administrative apparatus that governs us. No one knows exactly who sits on this board. I suspect that even those who, in retrospect, we can see have occupied senior positions in its ranks are often uncertain about their place in the hierarchy.  Elsewhere, I have invoked C.S. Lewis’s idea of “The Inner Ring” to explain the dynamics of this phenomenon.

lawyers

Sunday

Ruchir Sharma

Why America has more lawyers per capita than any other country

Despite the sharp polarization of American politics, there is surprising agreement on what went wrong with capitalism. Whether the writer or politician is coming at this question from the left or right, the blame often falls on four decades of “small government” ideology and free market orthodoxy since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Whether the flaw in question is slowing productivity growth, the rise of oligopolies, the export of jobs, or income and wealth inequality, its source is traced to excessive faith in the “magic of the market.” Capitalism’s flaws are “market failures.” The problem: this narrative is wrong on the facts.

lawyers

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

How did the internet become so horrific?

From our UK edition

I can dimly remember the internet getting going, gradually staking its claims on our attention with hardly anyone except tech nerds – and famously David Bowie – realising what was going on. In our defence it was the 1990s and we had a lot else to think about: Britpop, The End of History, lads’ mags, guacamole, supermodels, Tony Blair, Monica Lewinsky, etc. But here we all are now, in a world where I can do my banking from bed, America is fragmenting like papier-mâché in the rain, and primary school children can get porn on their smartphones. Can anyone recall the incremental steps that brought us here?

Tuesday

Michael Arditti

Back-room boys: Family Meal, by Bryan Washington, reviewed

From our UK edition

There are meals galore in Bryan Washington’s latest novel: those that Cam and his lover Kai cook for one another; those that Cam’s childhood friend TJ cooks for his Thai boyfriend’s cousins; those that TJ’s Vietnamese father Jin cooked for his neighbours every weekend; and those that the now bulimic Cam vomits up after Kai’s murder. There is also sex galore. Each of the novel’s three narrators – Cam, Kai and TJ – engages in ‘random hook-ups’, with Cam in particular using them to dull his pain. Working in a Houston gay bar, he takes customers to a back-room every few hours.

Thursday

David Renton

Who pays the price for Boris governing without scrutiny?

From our UK edition

Bailiff-enforced evictions have been banned during the pandemic. But landlords eager to give tenants the boot are finding ways around this rule. Since the start of lockdown, there has been an extraordinary increase in the number of tenants facing applications from landlords to control the terms under which people live in their homes.  Sometimes the playing of loud music is given as the reason. Other times it's because the TV is left on when neighbours are trying to sleep. Perhaps they have had visitors who slammed the front door of their block. But while the circumstances are often mundane, the effect on those who find themselves kicked out can be devastating.

Friday

Nick Freeman

Covid has exposed the crisis in our courts

From our UK edition

The other night I returned to my Cheshire home following a 500-mile round trip to the south of England to defend a client accused of drink driving. Along the way, I netted eight hours behind the wheel, one cheerless night in a deserted hotel and a surfeit of grisly service station sandwiches. All for the princely return of spending fruitless hours in a draughty waiting room — only to be told very late afternoon that the court had run out of time. How so? Three trials — including mine — had been listed for this particular courtroom. It only took one to get through the egg timer and monopolise the entire ‘court day’. And it wasn't mine.