Ashes and Sparks

The Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Sedley is a judge of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. Since being called to the Bar in 1964, he has been involved in high-profile cases and inquiries including the death of Blair Peach, the Bridgewater Four and Stefan Kiszko appeals and the contempt hearing against Kenneth Baker, then Home Secretary. He became a QC in 1983 and was appointed a High Court judge in 1992, serving in the Queen's Bench Division. In 1999 he was appointed to the Court of Appeal as a Lord Justice of Appeal. He is currently an honorary Professor of Law at Warwick University and the University of Wales at Cardiff, and the Judicial Visitor at University College London. His many lectures include the 1995 Paul Sieghart Memorial Lecture, the 1996 Radcliffe Lectures (with Lord Nolan), the 1998 Hamlyn Lectures, the 2005 Holdsworth Lecture and the 2006 Blackstone Lecture. He chaired the Judicial Studies Board's working party on the Human Rights Act 1998 and has, since 1999, been President of the British Institute of Human Rights.

• Part I. History: 1. Victors' justice; 2. Above it all; 3. Reading their rights; 4. From victim to suspect; 5. Farewell sovereignty; 6. No law at all; 7. The sound of silence; 8. The spark in the ashes; 9. Wringing out the fault; 10. Everything and nothing; 11. Skulls and crossbones; Part II. Judgery: 12. Justice miscarried; 13. The Guildford Four; 14. Declining the brief; 15. Big lawyers and little lawyers; 16. Parliament, government, courts; 17. Judges in lodgings; 18. Mice peeping out of oakum; 19. Justice in Chile; 20. Never do anything for the first time; 21. Rarely pure and never simple; 22. Law and plumbing; 23. The laws of documents; Part III. Justice: 24. The right to know; 25. The moral economy of judicial review; 26. Policy and law; 27. Responsibility and the law; 28. The Crown in its own courts; 29. Human rights - who needs them?; 30. Fundamental values - but which?; 31. Overcoming pragmatism; 32. Sex, libels and video-surveillance; 33. This beats me; 34. Public inquiries: a cure or a disease?; 35. Human rights: a 21st century agenda; 36. Are human rights universal, and does it matter?; 37. Bringing rights home: time to start a family?; 38. The three wise monkeys visit the marketplace of ideas.

'This excellent book gathers lectures and articles which Stephen Sedley has composed over about thirty years, as advocate, trial judge and lord justice. Readers will be impressed, as I have been, by his learning and by the great sagacity of his judgments on many of the prime legal issues of our time.' Tom Bingham (1933–2010), former Senior Law Lord