I gave a lecture last night at Clifford Chance in London on "Taming the Wild West: Government and the Internet". It touches on a number of currently contested areas of law and policy ranging from state surveillance and "surveillance capitalism" to online harms, antitrust and the corporation as courthouse. If the lecture were a website, [...]
The Prime Minister reported to the House of Commons last week that any further extension of the Article 50 notification period “would certainly mean participation in the European parliamentary elections”. I think she is wrong as a matter of law, and with five distinguished EU law experts (on whom, see further here), have written an [...]
Extremism and the Law was the subject of my Middle Temple Treasurer's Lecture on Monday evening. It was attended by a wonderfully diverse crowd, ranging from Supreme Court Justices to East London sixth-formers who had got to hear about it through The Big Voice, a legal outreach charity. The lecture is framed by the experience [...]
Here is a further Opinion on the legal effects of the Prime Minister's Brexit deal. A sequel to the one published on Tuesday, it addresses the novel suggestion - attributed this week to the Attorney General - that the UK could pull out of the Northern Ireland Backstop either unilaterally, via Article 62 of the Vienna [...]
I was asked to advise the People's Vote Campaign, with Jason Coppel QC and Sean Aughey of 11 King's Bench Walk, on the legal effect of the package of measures announced by the Government and the EU on the late evening of Monday 11 March. In our Opinion, produced overnight, we concluded: It is crystal [...]
This is the text of a lecture I delivered to journalism students and others at the University of Essex on 11 February 2019. Among the issues covered are the appearance vs the reality of terrorism in the West, and some of the dilemmas facing journalists as both investigators and reporters of terrorism. It finishes with a short discussion of [...]
I was invited to The Hague last month to deliver the Hague Lecture on International Law, to an invited audience of diplomats, international judges and others at the British Embassy. No expert on public international law, I concentrated instead on the threat of terrorism - real and perceived - and the role played by the courts of [...]
I spoke on this subject to the Human Rights Law Association on 25 October, at a meeting held to consider the effect of the 13 September 2018 Big Brother Watch judgment of the first section of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. My slides, which focussed on the utility and lawfulness of bulk investigatory powers (sometimes referred [...]
Generations of law students have grown up on Factortame - the Spanish Fishermen's case that for more than 25 years defined the UK's constitutional relationship with Europe. My own memoir of the case (in which I represented the Fishermen for 12 years) is to be published shortly in The European Advocate. Having helped me with that piece, [...]
The life of David Vaughan QC, a colleague in Chambers whom (though we were not related) I considered to be my father in the law, was celebrated yesterday evening at a Memorial Service in Temple Church, the central point of the community of barristers living and working in London. I was asked to give a tribute [...]
