Fake Law Quotes

“We may, in our darker thoughts, care little about whether a suspected terrorist is extradited to a state where he might be executed, or tortured, or might not receive a fair trial; but a legal system which permits this for a suspected terrorist would have to allow it for your partner, or friend, or teenage son whose computer whizz-kiddery lands him in hot water with the security services of a foreign power. Tearing down the edifice of human rights, as we are urged is in our interests, simply because it occasionally results in a benefit to people we don’t like, is the politics of the kindergarten.”
― The Secret Barrister, Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies

“And we swallow the MoJ’s premise that tribunals, and access to justice, are just for other people. Until it bites us, until we hear about our friend being abused by her co-workers for wearing a hijab, or see our ashen-faced husband come home, laid off without notice and with no idea where to turn, or learn that our teenage daughter is being paid below minimum wage and denied holiday pay by her leering, groping pub landlord, we can dismiss the true meaning of the protections we’ve spent decades constructing.”
― The Secret Barrister, Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies

“Throughout the web of the English Criminal Law one golden thread is always to be seen, that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner’s guilt . . . If, at the end of and on the whole of the case, there is a reasonable doubt, created by the evidence given by either the prosecution or the prisoner . . . the prosecution has not made out the case and the prisoner is entitled to an acquittal. No matter what the charge or where the trial, the principle that the prosecution must prove the guilt of the prisoner is part of the common law of England and no attempt to whittle it down can be entertained.12”
― The Secret Barrister, Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies

“At the heart of the concept of the rule of law is the idea that society is governed by law. Parliament exists primarily in order to make laws for society in this country. Democratic procedures exist primarily in order to ensure that the Parliament which makes those laws includes Members of Parliament who are chosen by the people of this country and are accountable to them. Courts exist in order to ensure that the laws made by Parliament, and the common law created by the courts themselves, are applied and enforced. That role includes ensuring that the executive branch of government carries out its functions in accordance with the law. In order for the courts to perform that role, people must in principle have unimpeded access to them. Without such access, laws are liable to become a dead letter, the work done by Parliament may be rendered nugatory, and the democratic election of Members of Parliament may become a meaningless charade. That is why the courts do not merely provide a public service like any other.”
― The Secret Barrister, Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies

“We deceive ourselves, our cognitive dissonance only resolved by our brains reassuring us that, in spite of what anyone else might think, we know we're in the right.”
― The Secret Barrister, Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies

“But – and I repeat in the vain hope that enough choruses might carry the message across the pond and through denser skulls”
― The Secret Barrister, Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies

“If we are being misled, or misinformed, or even directly lied to, to what end is this being done? Whose interests are really being served?”
― The Secret Barrister, Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies

“The thing that really distressed me,’ Margaret Hodge told the MoJ in 2014, ‘is how you embarked on this with so little evidence. When you were changing the rules, you had no idea the impact it would have.’99 Now the government knows the impact, and still sticks resolutely to its guns, the only available interpretation is that it simply doesn’t care.”
― The Secret Barrister, Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies