Why ‘earthlings’? David Miller isn’t drawing a contrast with justice for creatures from outer space. Nor is he taking issue directly with Ronald Dworkin’s...
Legal aid – the state subsidy of legal services – is supposed to ensure that it isn’t only the rich who can vindicate their rights.
Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’, when I read it first, came as a relief. For once, someone had said something true, or almost true, about religion and its shadowy aftermath....
Things aren’t going well for Chris Grayling, the secretary of state for justice. His ‘Spartan’ prisons policy and sacking of hundreds of warders coincided with a rise in...
The Amazon basin is roughly the size of the continental United States and contains more than a thousand shifting tributaries. If it had been found at the edge of human settlement, it would...
The double centenary in 2012 of the publication of Kafka’s The Judgment and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was marked only, to my knowledge, by a single conference, in California....
What’s really so bad about death? Unlike heartbreak, debt, public speaking or whatever else we may be afraid of, our own death isn’t something we experience. ‘Death,’...
Under joint enterprise there is no need to prove that you intended to commit the crime, and you don’t have to be the person who plunged the knife or pulled the trigger. You can be convicted on what’s...
The latest assault on Gaza has given fresh impetus to calls to bring Israel to account at the International Criminal Court. Since the UN General Assembly recognised the state of Palestine in...
At the village of Khanqe, in Iraqi Kurdistan, tens of thousands of Yazidi refugees were living in rows of UN-issued tents. They had been driven out of their homes in Sinjar, sixty miles to the...
The Christians’ Disneylands of architectural extravaganzas might be filled with colourful and thrilling, terrifying or sentimental images of Jesus and Mary and the saints, but these were not, they explained,...
Someone who indefatigably comes to your house when you have crawled away in exhaustion is a social monstrosity but also, quite possibly, simply caught in a wrinkle in time.
The birth of Prince George obviates the immediate need for the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 which introduced gender equality into the line of succession. Section 2 of the Act addresses,...
Once the state has decided to legalise gambling, two other choices remain: will it be permissible to profit from it, and will it be permissible to promote it?
Both Catholic and Protestant champions were expected to emulate the lives they could read about on the page and see on the walls of a church. Accounts and images of martyrdom dwelt on the details of torture...
As injury comes to be conceived as payment in default, the psyche develops a penitentiary logic.
For three years David Blunkett, then the Labour home secretary, had an affair with Kimberly Fortier, publisher of the Spectator. The affair came to an end in the summer of 2004. A few weeks...
‘An Autobiography’ by R.G. Collingwood must be one of the most popular philosophical books in the English language, but when it was published in 1939, it was not expected to do...