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“... It is conventional wisdom, at least among lawyers, that the Constitution of the United Kingdom is in its essentials the creation of the common law – an accretion of legal principles derived from judicial decisions which determine for the most part how the country is to be run from day to day. Apart from the historic texts – Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights – statutes were until this century regarded, by lawyers if not by Parliamentarians, as dangerous reefs in the great ocean of the common law, to be observed chiefly in order to circumnavigate them ...”

“... The end of history seems a good moment to take stock. Fukuyama’s conceit (I mean it in both senses) that the triumph of Western liberalism has stopped the clock of change – has put an end to history – is already waning. We may reflect that human rights themselves have played a sacrificial role in this process, for the demise of the regimes of Eastern Europe was accelerated by a megaphone rhetoric about human rights from states, including our own, with an embarrassing capacity for overlooking human rights abuses among their own allies and clients and even within their own frontiers ...”

“... For at the common law . . . his fault was not to be wrung out of himself, but rather to be discovered by other means, and other men. William Blackstone, Commentaries If you were sitting down today to set out the principles of a good system of criminal justice, with a blank sheet of paper and all the wisdom of hindsight at your disposal, you would probably start, as I would, with the principle that nobody is to be convicted of anything unless the court is sure of their guilt ...”

“... Stephen Sedley and Lawrence Kaplan seek to map a new course for the post-socialist Left, and to turn attention away from that beguiling but now exploded theme, egalitarianism. The long fixation with egalitarianism has, they complain, allowed the Right today to ‘appropriate the word liberty and equate it with the acquisition of power’; and the phenomenon of Thatcherism would certainly bear them out ...”

“... populist ‘excess’, then we should naturally be interested in who they are. Lord Nolan and Sir Stephen Sedley, joint authors of The Making and Remaking of the British Constitution, are two of the many recent appointments to the Bench which have excited hopes that the courts are about to deploy their well-established legal powers to protect from state ...”

“... chauvinism was long hardwired into constitutional interpretation. According to Stephen Tierney, the constitution’s Whiggish interpreters bear considerable responsibility for the current predicament of the United Kingdom. There has been no serious attempt to understand the 1707 Treaty of Union as a fundamental ‘transformation’ rather ...”

“... Press, 242 pp., £18 and £5.95, 18 June, 0 335 10580 7), Remembering Orwell, compiled by Stephen Wadhams, introduced by George Woodcock (Penguin, 227 pp., £2.95, 27 September, 0 14 007458 9), Nineteen Eighty-Four and All’s Well? by Tom Winnifrith and William Whitehead (Macmillan, 104 pp., £15 and £5.95, 4 April, 033 33493 0), Nineteen ...”

“... than litigation but less anarchic than street fighting’, the former Court of Appeal judge Stephen Sedley once said. Often they are ordered simply to manage a public outcry. They can divert an issue from the political realm and so defer calls for action. The delay can be politically expedient. The Scott Inquiry into the Matrix Churchill ...”

“... Bint told the inquest he had almost no memory of what happened. Here is his cross-examination by Stephen Sedley, the barrister acting for Peach’s family: Sedley: Who was in the front passenger seat? Bint: I don’t know. Sedley: Who else was in the van? Bint: I think ...”

“... the parties had no prior relationship of trust which could have been breached, Lord Justice Stephen Sedley considered that unimportant; the time had come, he said, to recognise that people enjoyed privacy as a self-standing right ‘drawn from the fundamental value of personal autonomy’. A slew of celebrities proceeded to take advantage of this ...”

“... to the bench of intelligent and progressive voices like those of Harry Woolf, Thomas Bingham and Stephen Sedley. By the mid-1990s, the senior judiciary were conducting a spirited campaign of defiance against successive Tory home secretaries over such issues as the need to obey court orders and to sentence convicted prisoners in a moderately humane ...”

“... almost as though it were a simple matter of logic. Writing in this paper some months ago, Stephen Sedley considered the off-the-shelf solution of incorporation of the European Convention’ to head the list of possible reforms in this area ‘if only on the practical ground that adherence to a set of standards enforceable on the state by an ...”

“... is so alluring and so suspect; the astounding unreality of it all immerses you. If you sat through Stephen Daldry’s The Reader recently, you might have found it tough to resist the thought: ‘Those poor Nazi guards, they really suffered.’ Watching GWTW, you are similarly corralled into feeling: ‘Those poor plantation owners, they really had it ...”

“... on the part of member states, has enormous implications for the Convention. Matters are much as Stephen Sedley predicted in 1997, when he argued that unless it is seen as a ‘living thing, adopted by civilised countries for a humanitarian end, constant in motive but mutable in form, the Convention will eventually become an anachronism’. Perhaps it ...”