I f Britain votes to leave the EU it will take several years to disentangle what’s to be kept and what discarded from our EU-saturated legislation. The law of the European Union has left...
As he lay dying Alexander Litvinenko solved his own murder and foresaw the future: a professional detective on his last case, with himself as the victim.
I n October 2015, the government amended the ministerial code, removing all references to the obligation on ministers to comply with international law when carrying out their duties. This...
Is it a condition on the acceptability of warfare that those who kill should put their lives on the line?
U ntil the Supreme Court gave its landmark judgment in R. v. Jogee on 18 February, it was possible for someone to be convicted of a crime which they did not personally commit or intend to...
It is striking how many Catholic organisations seem to do a whole range of lucrative things they were never set up to do, while still enjoying tax exemption as religious institutions.
O n 11 December, the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, announced that all outstanding cases against Mirror Group journalists for phone hacking would be dropped, and that no...
B ack in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to...
N ot for the first time, Mr Justice Peter Smith, a judge of the Chancery Division of the High Court, got his personal life and his judicial work entangled. This time it concerned his luggage,...
S ometime in the late 430s, the pious nun Melania recalled a vision she and her husband had shared thirty years before in Rome when they were young and very rich: One night we went to sleep,...
Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs.
One night in July Wang Yu, a lawyer in her mid-forties, returned to her home in Beijing after seeing her husband and teenage son off at the airport, unaware that they had both been detained by police...
W hat do the fish call Muhammad? One of his earliest disciples said that different creatures called him by different names. He was known as Abd al-Quddus under the sea and Abd al-Ghaffar among...
N otwithstanding the 55:45 split between unionists and nationalists in the independence referendum last autumn, the major – if unacknowledged – cleavage in Scottish politics lies...
Philosophers may talk about justice or rights, but they don’t often try to reshape the world according to their ideals.
O n the face of it a Dictionary of Untranslatables looks like a contradiction in terms, either self-imploding from the word go, or, if pursued, headed fast down a cul-de-sac in which it is...
M ark Greif’s book is a bracingly ambitious attempt at a ‘philosophical history’ of the American mid-century, a chronological account of writers and their ideas. It begins in...
Why are MPs so out of kilter with public opinion?