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Who are Britain's most powerful lawyers?...
The Times Law 100
Who are Britain's most powerful lawyers? The debate this year was lengthy and
sometimes fiery, but here are our picks.
Scorned and ridiculed they may be — but lists of the top 100 in any profession
are still compulsive reading. This is the second year of the Times Law 100 — our
pick of the most powerful and influential in the law today.
Who is in and who out? There was heated debate among the judges — not least over
how to weigh the power of an in-house counsel with a multi-million-pound company
in his hands against a lone lawyer creating law at the frontier of human rights.
In the end the choice spans all types of work, from academia to the judiciary,
and entrants stand on their own merits — we ruled out informal quotas so as to
stop too big an entry from one chambers, firm or college.
No surprise, probably, that Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers takes the No 1
slot. Last year Phil Shiner was the Top 10 wild card — this year there’s
another, in the shape of Clive Stafford Smith. Lord Pannick, QC, is a second new
entry. After feedback, one or two notable omissions last year are in.
On the corporate side, those who make the list are at the helm of firms and
corporate legal departments that are holding up in tougher times — and so
increasing their influence. The sector will emerge from the recession in a
different shape; these people are at the heart of it. Unlike their US
counterparts, business lawyers have a lower profile in Britain, as reflected in
none making our Top 10. But with lawyers on the front line of
bailout-restructuring work and the mass of litigation and regulatory work yet to
come, the case next year for including the likes of Charles Randell, from
Slaughter and May, could be irresistible.
As before, some big names don’t make it, because it’s not a list of excellence
or popularity, although those factors are there. Nor is it a moral or social
judgment or comment on likeability. Others miss out because they are non-lawyers
— such as the heads of some powerful legal quangos. Timeliness plays its part:
25 names from 2008 are out, often because they no longer hold an official post
that gave them their influence. Others fail to make it because their star has
faded, albeit temporarily. The list is inevitably something of a snapshot,
influenced by current events, despite seeking to take a longer view.
THE TOP TEN
1. Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, pictured above, was a clear favourite for
our No 1 slot this year. Last year’s Lord Chief Justice is now the senior law
lord, heading the highest court in the land. Lord Phillips, 71, is actually now
lower in the judicial hierarchy than last year as senior law lord, ranking below
the Lord Chief Justice (Lord Judge). But with the opening of the UK’s Supreme
Court in the autumn he holds an unrivalled position of influence at the apex of
the judiciary. Set to become the court’s first president, Lord Phillips will
lead the 12 justices who make legal and constitutional history as they begin
work in their new court that is independent and physically separate from the
legislature. The broadcasting of appeals is just one groundbreaking reform he is
expected to oversee; but it will be how he shapes the delivery and content of
decisions that will count most. Lord Phillips, who went to Bryanston School
(where he is chairman of governors) and King’s College, Cambridge, has held the
three top judicial posts: Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice and now senior
law lord.
2. Lord Judge, 68, is the most senior criminal judge in England and Wales: he
finally secured the position after being pipped to the post last time round by
Lord Phillips. Highly popular with fellow judges, he has steered a steady course
through the choppy waters of the controversial proposals for a sentencing
commission and looks likely to achieve the flexibility judges want. But he is
ready to go public if needs be: at the annual judges’ dinner he launched a
two-pronged attack — on the volume of legislation and on ministers’ plans for an
outside body to scrutinise MPs' standards and expenses. That, he warned, could
risk a constitutional clash between judges and the legislature if its decisions
came before the courts. Born in Malta, he went to the Oratory School, Woodcote,
Berkshire, and Cambridge. Kindly but tough, traditionalist but pragmatic, he has
backed moves to make the judiciary more diverse and expressed concern that
people see it as “fustian” and “old-fashioned”. He has cautioned against longer
jail terms without calculating the costs involved but gave the go-ahead for the
first non-jury criminal trial. He is just in to his stride. We can expect to
hear more.
3. Jack Straw, as Lord Chancellor and first Secretary of State for Justice,
still wields huge power at the pinnacle of the justice system. Policy on courts,
legal aid, prisons and the Probation Service, sentencing, the criminal law and
constitutional affairs all come under his patch. He also carries much weight in
government, and at points of crisis is regularly named as likely caretaker
leader were Gordon Brown to go. He is overseeing cuts across the justice system
of £1,070 million over three years, including £200 million from the legal aid
budget; and has opened up the family courts to the media. Skilful and
experienced, he is now the “father” of the Cabinet (he is 63 in August); he has
been both Home and Foreign Secretary as well as Leader of the Commons.He went to
Leeds University and was active in student politics, famously serving as
president of the National Union of Students from 1969 to 1971. A year later he
was called to the Bar but that career was shortlived. He is the first
full-blooded politician to be Lord Chancellor. He has paradoxically had a much
better working relationship with the judges than his career-barrister
predecessor, Lord Falconer of Thoroton.
4. Lord Bingham of Cornhill remains a powerful legal figure even though he has
retired as senior law lord. Still regarded as the pre-eminent lawyer of his
generation with a brilliant, incisive mind, he will continue to have influence.
Since retiring as senior law lord he has launched an attack on the “cynical”
disregard of the Bush Administration for international law and over the legal
advice given by Lord Goldsmith, then Attorney-General, to the Government on the
invasion of Iraq. An appeal has been launched by the British Institute of
International and Comparative Law for a centre in his name and under his
guidance for the study and promotion of the rule of law. Lord Bingham went to
Sedbergh School and Balliol College, Oxford, before a career at the Bar and
judiciary — in which he held all three posts of Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief
Justice and finally senior law lord with consummate skill. He has always been a
strong advocate of a separate supreme court and is sorry not to be in post to
see its creation. He was appointed a Knight of the Garter in 2005 — the first
judge to be granted the honour.
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Lawyers in Acton
From Times Online
The Times/Matrix debate on the Human Rights Act provokes rousing rhetoric
An overwhelming majority of the (legal) audience supported Cherie Booth,
QC's fierce defence of the Human
With an audience of lawyers, the result was probably never in doubt. But
the Times/Matrix debate on Tuesday night (April 20) on the motion: “The
Human Rights Act should be scrapped and replaced by a British Bill of
Rights” still managed to produce a sparky discussion and even a few
fireworks.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, took Andy Hayman, former Assistant
Commissioner at the Met and head of Counter-Terrorism, to task over a
reference he made to the victims of the terrorist attack of 7/7. She
called the mention a cheap trick that had nothing to do with the Human
Rights Act - and found herself castigated by a member of the audience for
rudeness such as he had never witnessed in her TV performances.
Hayman was on the team proposing the motion led by David Davis,
parliamentary candidate and civil liberties campaigner, as well as former
shadow Home Secretary. (“I don’t know what David Davis is doing there -
he’s on the wrong side”, Chakrabarti quipped.) The team also included
Martin Howe, QC, a member of the Conservative Party commission set up to
draft a Bill of Rights.
Cherie Booth, QC, a founder member of Matrix whose husband’s Government
introduced the Act in the first place, led the opposers, consisting of
Rabinder Singh, QC, a leading human rights silk also from Matrix, as well
as Chakrabarti.
The debate is not purely an academic one: the Tories aim to do just what
the motion suggested - Dominic Grieve, QC, the shadow justice secretary,
calls the plan “Human Rights Act-plus”. But doubts persist about whether
he carries all his colleagues; and whether it will end as “HRA-minus”.
As Hugh Tomlinson, QC, another of Matrix’s leading silks and the organiser
of the event, told the afternoon forum that preceded the debate: “The
[Conservative] proposal is a relatively modest one. It does not appear to
include any of the “new rights”, which others have included in recently
drafted human rights instruments. But there is no proposal to withdraw
from the European Convention on Human Rights and so the Bill will be
“Convention-plus” - the familiar rights with the addition of a small
number of distinctively British (or perhaps United Kingdom) ones.”
A British Bill of Rights, he added, could be a “radical new beginning.
Perhaps under the Liberal Democrats’ proposals there would be such a new
beginning - with rights being set out in a “rights chapter” of a written
constitution.” As for Labour, it appeared to have “abandoned its
intemperate opposition to its own human rights legislation and replaced it
with an affirmation of the Human Rights Act and vague talk about a future
written constitution.
So the Conservatives were left as the sole proponents of repeal of the
Act. But their modest proposal looked “unlikely to have a substantial
impact on the protection of rights in the United Kingdom”.
That did not deter Davis who made an eloquent case for the motion. Did the
Act herald a great period of improvement of huamn rights in the UK, he
asked? Had it brought “better justice, greater freedom, greater
privacy?”The very opposite: it had brought about the unfettered growth of
the database, surveillance society and the erosion by the Government of
individual rights and freedoms. He cited stop-and-search powers, control
orders, proposals to detain suspects without charge for up to 90 days, the
new surveillance powers of local councils - and the arrest of a woman for
reading out the names of Iraq war dead at the Cenotaph.
The Act, he concluded, had failed to prevent erosions of our liberty: “It
has failed in its fundamental purpose.”
In addition, it had had several “perverse consequences”, such as foreign
criminals managing to evade deportation through “the grotesque distortion
of the most repressive libel laws in the world”.
The reason, he said, was that the Act was a “lazy” one, based purely on
the European Convention on Human Rights, a “declaratory document” lacking
precision and which “reeks of compromise”, and extended into areas that
should be the domain of domestic law-makers. A British Bill of Rights
giving powers back to Parliament to improve laws where necessary would
strengthen democracy, he said.
Cherie Booth, QC, said that few pieces of legislation had had such a bad
press as the Human Rights Act. The Daily Telegraph, she said, had
described it as the “world’s worst law” and it had been painted as a
charter for rapists and murderers. It was depicted as a “plot by Tony
Blair to undermine the Magna Carta and for sneaky foreigners to extent
control over little England by the back door”.
But it was not down to Tony Blair “but Nick Clegg - sorry I mean Winston
Churchill”: and the rights drawn up in the European Convention were not
alien rights foisted on us but were drafted by British lawyers. As for
trial by jury, more than 90 per cent of cases were tried by magistrates
and not by jury at all, she said. “What the Human Rights Act did was what
the Government said it would - bring human rights home.” That meant rights
could be decided in courts here, rather than in Strasbourg and “British
judges could decide”.
Despite myths that the Act helped criminals and illegal immigrant over the
law-abiding taxpaying majority, it was never pointed out that a great many
claims were dismised by courts as friviolous or vexatious; nor that the
Act had made a “huge difference” to “so many ordinary people who find
themselves confronted with the power of the state”.
“Human rights do protect the most vulnerable in our society. If we don’t
protect these groups, how can we be confident that the rest of us will be
protected?” The act, she added, protected rights that were universal,
values that “the British public know in their heart of hearts they want to
see protected.
“Even the Daily Telegraph, nine years after the Act has been in force,
agreed it had done something useful - and prevented the private clamping
of cars.”
Martin Howe, QC, pointed out that a new UK Bill of Rights would contain
the existing principles of the Act. But it would bring benefits: greater
precision and clarity in the law - the present broadly worded Act led to
misinterpretation. A new act would define the rights more closely and
their relevance - with the result that it would be easier to stop
“specious and unjustified claims being put forward.”
It would enshrine rights not now in the Act, such as right to trial by
jury in criminal cases; correct “some of the imbalances that have grown
up”, such as that between privacy and freedom of expression; would
“reconnect citizens with our own courts”; give courts greater freedom to
challenge the “more questionable jurisprudence of Strasbourg (our courts,
he added, had been “unduly craven to Strasbourg, acting as if it was like
the European Court of Justice, which it is not”); and “re-engage our
legislators with safeguarding rights” and “return law-making to elected
representatives in Parliament, rather than the courts and lawyers.”
Rabinder Singh, QC, went through a long line of powerful human rights
rulings - some of those cases, without the Act, would have been impossible
to bring, let alone win, he said. They included security of tenure for
same sex couples; the ruling that required councils to give support to
asylum seekers if sleeping on the streets; the Belmarsh ruling that
suspects could not be detained without trial. “By all means add some
rights to the ECHR,” he said. “But I don’t accept we need to scrap the Act
- there is a danger we will end up with ECHR minus.” The Tory proposals
were, “if I have understood them correctly, the most pointless piece of
gesture politics”.
Andy Hayman told the audience that he was not a lawyer, not a politican,
but just a “simple cop” who was going to give them a “reality check”. The
present Act had created a lot of confusion and needed to be got rid of, so
that there could be gerater clarity. “The position we are in is the worst
of all worlds - it is undermining the confidence of society, with the vast
majority more worried that it is giving more rights to offenders than
victims.”
He warned that it was also undermining the efforts of the police and law
enforcement agencies to protect public safety as they tried to tackle the
dilemma, along with the courts and authorities, of achieving a balance
between the protection of citizens and their liberty.
“It is also breeding a culture of fear in authorities as they try to make
sense of all this - it is a culture of rights without responsibilities,”
he added. A British Bill of Rights would bring clarity. The police did not
want to face bereaved families after a terrorist atrocity, having been
hampered in their efforts by confusion over the Act. “Victims want the
authorites to be able to do their job, to protect us.”
Shami Chakrabarti, rounding up for the opposing team, said that the
“elephant in the room” was that the proposers were saying: “We want rights
and freedoms for people like me and in particular, nothing for
foreigners.” Even if there were some defects with the Act, was it to be
thrown out entirely?
The Act had not prevented some bad legislation from being passed - but it
had helped “after the event”, enabling people to challenge legislation,
she said. Much of its unpopularity also stemmed from “lies” - such as that
it enabled a prisoner to have pornography or stopped the police putting up
wanted posters. “Yes, it is a battered old suitcase and people spit on it.
But when you open it up, there is treasure inside.” She ended with a
quotation along the lines of: “I would rather live in a country where
these rights were protected than one where they were not protected.” It
was from Tom Bingham.
It was good rousing rhetoric. At the start of the debate, Conor Geary,
professor of human rights law at the London School of Economics and Matrix
member, who acted as faciltator with charm and authority, asked for a show
of hands. All but four of the 175-strong audience opposed the motion. At
the end, there was almost no change: the four had increased minimally, to
eleven.
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