Who I am and what this Substack will be about
Who I am
My professional website will tell you that I am a King’s Counsel (senior barrister[1]) at Monckton Chambers[2], and specialise in a range of topics (competition law, trade, subsidy control, VAT, medicines law, other regulatory law) which are connected by a common thread of largely being based on what the UK has inherited from its EU membership. (I sometimes describe my practice, not entirely flippantly, as being in the smoking debris of EU law.) In that area, I have done many cases in the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court and in the Court of Justice of the EU. Clients tend to be companies or public bodies (I was on the Attorney General’s panel of Counsel, advising and representing central UK government departments and UK ministers, for many years before I became a KC and am still on the Welsh Government panel[3]).
But none of that tells you very much about me.
I grew up in north London: my parents were both senior civil servants but I had no legal family background. (Despite my Jewish surname my upbringing was not at all Jewish, and as it happens I am Anglican, of a liberal Anglo-Catholic kind.) I went to a state boys’ school that had just converted from a grammar school to a comprehensive, but was still enough of a grammar school to offer Ancient Greek at A-level, which I took. I got into Oxford to read PPE, the course that notoriously provided three of our five Prime Ministers since 2010 – indeed, I was in the same year as Cameron (Truss and Sunak were both after my time). As to whether the central learning aim of PPE – to equip students with the understanding of political economy that is needed competently to run the UK – was sufficiently achieved in their cases, views will differ (though I suspect in at least some of those cases not differ by much). Whether it was achieved in mine will fortunately never be tested, but it did equip me with a basic grounding in economics that later proved useful as a competition lawyer and an interest in political theory and the way our constitution works or doesn’t work that pulled me in the direction of public law.
The route to getting there turned out to be a bit indirect. I wasn’t taken on at the end of pupillage and found my way into the Government Legal Service and specifically to the Office of Fair Trading, working alongside (now Sir) Jonathan Jones, who later became Treasury Solicitor, who was then also at the start of his career. Government service is a great start to a legal career: you get a lot of interesting and high-profile work – in my case dealing with huge, front page of the FT mergers and OFT policy interventions – far earlier than you would in private practice. Most importantly for me, it was where I met my wife, another distinguished government lawyer, who has been a steady, if often exasperated, support ever since.
After five years at the OFT I felt I knew some competition law (learnt, in a way that leaves German lawyer friends of mine muttering “does not compute” into their beer, entirely on the job and with no academic training at all). And I also wanted to do some real advocacy. So I applied to Monckton Chambers and ended up doing a trial pupillage which turned into tenancy. And there I have been ever since.
To put it mildly, public and EU law have been rather at the centre stage of our political debate over the last few years. As a specialist in the area, you can react in different ways to that. But my reaction has been to try to do something to help the debate, by trying – in popular articles, on Twitter/BlueSky, in conversations and briefings with journalists and MPs to improve understanding of the issues and dispel myths. In doing that I’ve met – virtually and in real life – a lot of interesting people, and managed more or less to avoid much of the venom you find on social media (being white and male helps a lot there, unfortunately).
But social media is not enough: getting things changed requires work in the real world. So I converted my long-term but generally passive (and slightly on-and-off – I found both the Iraq War and Corbyn hard to take) Labour Party membership into an active one: I am on the executive of the Society of Labour Lawyers, co-chair the Business and Trade group, and have done a lot of work in helping Labour spokespeople in Parliament dealing with the cascade of dreadful legislation thrown at them by the current government. And I’ve tried to do my share of the basic boots-on-the-ground stuff; canvassing locally and in marginal seats, leafleting, local party meetings and so on.
I have no idea what impact any of this has had: but I am not entirely sure that I care: the point is to do your bit rather than to expect to have produced anything tangible.
One thing I have learnt is that there are a lot of our fellow citizens out there who are really interested in the work that lawyers and courts do, and really appreciate it when it’s explained to them. People want to understand what how the law works, how it doesn’t work, and what should be done to change it for the better without destroying what it does well. In a democracy governed by the rule of law it is important that we don’t say that law is all too complicated and that lawyers and judges know best - not least because if we do that, we may find we aren’t living in one any more.
And – though I can’t point to any paid work I have got out of it – I think that drafting for a non-legal but interested audience has improved me as a lawyer: having to draft in 280 characters, or a short blog or article, is a stern discipline, especially when you are having to explain to a non-specialist audience, accurately enough, something complicated but important.
This substack: The Political Lawyer
So, why this title?
The relationship between law and politics is complicated. All law reflects moral and practical judgments that are the stuff of politics – and that is true even of areas that tend to be thought of as “technical” or “non-political” such as contract or land law, which incorporate and reflect a series of moral and practical judgments about commerce and property ownership. But some areas of law, because they concern fundamental questions of the relationship between the State and individuals or businesses, or the relationships between different parts of the State, are particularly prone to be the subject of active political controversy. Those happen to include the areas in which I practise.
Lawyers who wish to comment on those areas of law can take a number of approaches to the political controversy that surrounds them. One is to disengage yourself – or at least try to disengage yourself – from the politics and confine yourself to explaining and commenting on the law in neutral terms. Joshua Rozenberg is a stellar example of how to do that very well – though even he lets his opinions on such controversial matters as UK membership of the ECHR show through, on occasion. There are also examples, which I won’t single out, of how to do it badly: and one particular way in which to do it badly is to pretend to be “politics free” when it is, consciously or unconsciously, obvious, through the language chosen and the way in which the legal issues are approached, that the writer has very strong political opinions about what he or she is discussing.
Other legal commentators have strong opinions about what the law should be, and political views in a broad sense, that they freely share. The Secret Barrister is a well-known example, as is Jolyon Maugham KC.
For my part, I find that latter approach – being up front about my views of what the law should be, and over and above that, my overall politics – easier than putting on a mask of neutrality which I would then have to worry constantly about letting slip, not least because my politics inevitably shape my views of the law and what it should be.
So this substack is going to look at areas where law and politics mix, and it is going to do so – because that is where I am – from a broadly social democratic, Labour perspective. Since, if the polls are to be believed, Labour is going to be in government at some point over the next year or so, that perspective may interest not just those who share it, but those who don’t.
I have a busy professional practice: that means that I have no need to earn any money from this blog and won’t be charging for it. But it also means that I can’t promise any regularity in content: it will depend on my other commitments (and on whether I have anything I have to say).
For those of you who follow me on Twitter/X or Bluesky, my activity on Twitter/X will now – largely because of the deterioration of that site as a useful place for learning or contributing anything – be limited to passive watching and posting of links to here. I will do a bit more on Bluesky, but essentially this blog will allow me to write short blogs rather than threads. And I promise you that – not least because I have to find time to write them – most blogs will be a lot shorter than this one.
[1] For non-UK/Irish readers, the UK and Irish legal professions are divided into barristers (advocates in Scotland) who focus on advocacy before the courts (and sometimes, in the UK, wear wigs), and solicitors, who focus on legal advice. The difference is, however now very blurred.
[2] NB because barristers are self-employed, barristers’ chambers are not legally anything like a partnership or law firm. It is essentially a costs-sharing arrangement: we jointly pay for e.g. premises, IT, and support staff. But we are all financially independent and can (and often do) each act for opposite parties in the same piece of litigation. Importantly for this blog, other members of my Chambers have nothing whatsoever to do with anything I say here – with which, on occasion, many of them may profoundly disagree.
[3] The UK (along with Ireland) is unusual in Europe in that public lawyers frequently act both for and against public bodies.