I found The Secret Barrister’s narrative to be very readable, the tone personable and the information is presented in a logical and accessible manner. Regardless of whether you are in the legal field of not, this book by the Secret Barrister is worth a read! It is easy to understand and should be something everyone in the UK, at the very least, should be reading. In the meantime, this sat alongside what was going on in the US, where a change in similar legislation bought about “Stand your Ground Law”. Me gusta el contenido y te cuenta la realidad del mundo jurídico, más que los titulares que vemos en las noticias o en las redes sociales.

I love the law, I have since I was 13 and first became entranced by the idea of pursuing it as a profession. The cases are specific to the UK and its legal system (which is similar enough to the Australia’s that I understand the generalities) but ‘fake law’ is not a phenomenon unique to the UK.The title of this book leads one to consider what is the relationship between Fake News and Fake Law and in some ways the comparisons can be canny. Immediately following the arrest the arrested man died and there was a trial where it was claimed the home owner acted in self-defence and did not contribute to the man's death. The day a judge makes a binding decision affecting the rights and liberties of one of us, not on the legal and factual merits, but with a nervous glance to the press and public galleries, or with a beady eye on political favour or punishment, is the day that the decay in our democracy turns terminal. What happens when the media and people have all decided someone is guilty and so any lawyer that might represent them should be cancelled?

Well written, clearly structured, it is a depressing read but it is a polemic which does, at the end, offer practical suggestions for improvement. He got charged with manslaughter and there was an outcry of support for him, he was only defending what was his. Helena Kennedy wrote that by changing the law to satisfy the victim can have unintended consequences. Crime does get a look in, quite late in the book, and surprisingly (given that TSB is a criminal practitioner) I found that the most pedestrian and weakly argued chapter.Where a defendant pleads guilty, it means that he is accepting having committed a criminal offence in the way alleged by the prosecution. In 2016 and 2017, the Secret Barrister was named Independent Blogger of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards.

g.) such as those who wanted to kill the two 10 year old boys when they were found guilty of killing 2 year old James Berger in 1993. It is bizarre that, for a nation so clearly susceptible to suspicion of ulterior motive, we disengage our critical faculties and swallow blindly the propaganda of billion-pound insurance companies. In his or her sights are the misrepresentations and downright lies told every day by politicians, the press and Twitter trolls.We lie back and allow ourselves to be enveloped in misinformed resentment towards our suffering neighbours receiving restitution, viewing it as a sore on, rather than a credit to, a civilised society. Often the media win in this ‘tug of war’ because they able to shout the loudest especially, as it becomes the headline banner. The law, and your ability to turn to it for redress when you are wronged, is what is preventing you from being irreversibly mangled by an intoxicated surgeon in a botched operation and then uncompensated; from a manufacturer selling you a faulty dishwasher without liability when it subsequently burns down your house ; from an ex-partner maliciously being able to keep you from seeing your children because you doinked the babysitter; from your boss capriciously firing you because he doesn’t like the fact you wear brown shoes with a black suit to work; from you being wrongfully identified as an armed robber by the short-sighted bank teller who came to work without her contact lenses that day and banged up for a ten stretch; or from a government deciding that the freedom of religion is no longer a human right exercisable by the denizens of our country and forcing you into trying to find an affordable house with a priest-hole in which to hide the unfortunate administrator of your future clandestine religious services. Some people, feeling very intimidated, or perhaps they do know all about something but it was a brother or someone close, or just because they are jumpy, emotionally-unstable people cause the person administering the test to conclude they are lying or hiding something. Or, for some of them, parroting because although they don't believe in it themselves, they don't want to face the social consequences from their group or and educational establishment or work, if they speak out or even remain silent themselves.

The overall thesis is this: the public is being conned out of its rights and – like turkeys voting for Christmas – not only accepts, but applauds that fact.

The book frequently delves into a whirlpool of legal nonsense where one can easily lose their sense of direction especially, if you consider whether the law should protect the villain or the victim. The ability to spread the tougher topics around the context means that while after a chapter you may need time to process and decompress, you don't feel emotionally overwhelmed during the chapters as you would with blunt matter of fact talk of sometimes truly harrowing accounts. Crucially, it doesn’t matter if you’re correct in this assumption, it only matters that you genuinely thought, at that moment, that your life was in danger. The flaw is how we approach the issue of self-defence is located not in the law, not in its application by the justice system but in our common understanding and that understanding - or rather lack of it - can be more influential than the law itself. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.