The book is relentless in its forensic deconstruction of these myths.īy regular reference to ‘The Court of Public Opinion’, a place where politicians and media go when they don’t like Courts of Law, we see how easy it is to create a lynch mob approach to justice and a climate where politicians can thrive when openly boasting about breaking the law. They tend to get in the way, and a narrative needs to be created in the public mind, which denigrates them (hence, it’s all the fault of the ‘lefty human rights lawyers and other do gooders’). The Secret Barrister makes clear, ‘As with so much else of what we’ve seen in these pages, the greatest trick they are pulling is convincing you that the alleged “criminal” will never be you.’įor those in power, lawyers and the law can be real irritants. Neither, as the book cogently reminds us on numerous occasions, do we anticipate that we might need to challenge a department of state, or claim for devastating injury, or seek access to our children, and so when the government uses it as the perennial ‘whipping post’, who cares?Īfter all, it would be a very lonely place on our doorsteps every Thursday evening if we were all invited out to clap for the lawyers… Unless of course you are one of those who has suffered or lost loved ones as a result of negligence or incompetence, or wanted to hold the government to account, or might one day in the future. We will not be wrongly accused the criminal justice system is there to bring the ‘bad guys’ to justice. The problem, as the book points out, is that most people in this country think that the legal system is there for someone else. It cites flagrant inaccuracies, many of them deliberate, which fundamentally undermine trust in the entire process. Page after page of The Secret Barrister’s much anticipated second book presents eye-watering examples of misrepresentations about the law, the courts and the people who work in them.

(And the depressing thing about it, is that it works.) Only recently, Boris Johnson has been citing ‘lefty lawyers’ as public enemy number one when it comes to the fair administration of justice in this country, sounding a dog whistle to the media and public alike and diverting attention from the ineptitude of politicians. The latest offering from The Secret Barrister – a devastating analysis of the gulf between what we think we know and the reality of how our justice system works – couldn’t be more timely.

Fake law book