Law and Justice

Thomas Bingham, Nicholas Phillips and Eleanor Sharpston

Alan Macfarlane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032158945
• eBook ISBN: 9781000507843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Law and Justice: Thomas Bingham, Nicholas Phillips and Eleanor Sharpston is the first time a collection of interviews is being published as a book. These interviews have been conducted by one of England's leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane.

Filmed over a period of several years, the three conversations in this volume are part of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions also form part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences, the sciences and the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three of Britain's foremost lawyers and judges.

Law and justice are an intrinsic part of any civilization, ancient or modern. English law traces its origins to medieval times, at times drawing on ancient legal systems prevalent in Roman and Anglo-Saxon laws. This tradition has had a huge influence across the world through export to the United States and throughout the nations of the former British Empire. The three conversations in this volume further reflect how interconnected the disciplines of history and law are. Thomas Bingham, Nicholas Phillips and Eleanor Sharpston give a wide sketch of the legal system through their own experiences and interpretations. They show how one of the single most important and unique features of British civilization works.

The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in the subject of Law and Justice but also History and Culture Studies as well as those with an interest in Legal Literature.

Please note: This title is co-published with Social Science Press, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

PART
one

Thomas Henry Bingham. Photograph courtesy Alan Macfarlane.

Thomas Henry Bingham

Thomas Henry Bingham, Baron Bingham of Cornhill, KG, PC, FBA (13 October 1933-11 September 2010), was an eminent British judge who was successively Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord. He was described as the greatest lawyer of his generation. Baroness Hale of Richmond observed that his pioneering role in the formation of the United Kingdom Supreme Court may be his most important and long-lasting legacy. Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers regarded Bingham as 'one of the two great legal figures of my lifetime in the law'. Lord Hope remembered Bingham as 'the greatest jurist of our time'.

After retiring from the judiciary in 2008, Bingham focused on teaching and lecturing in human rights law. The British Institute of International and Comparative Law named the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law in his honour.

Bingham succeeded Lord Donaldson as Master of the Rolls in 1992 and initiated significant reforms, including a move towards the replacement of certain oral hearings in major civil law cases. He was one of the first senior judges to give public support to incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into English law, which ultimately came about with the passing of the Human Rights Act 1998. Despite being less experienced in criminal law, Bingham was appointed Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales in 1996, following Lord Taylor. In England and Wales, he was the highest-ranking judge in regular courtroom service; he was personally responsible for adding 'and Wales' to the office's title.

He was created a Life Peer as Baron Bingham of Cornhill, of Boughrood in the County of Powys, on 4 June 1996, enabling him to serve on the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. He continued as Lord Chief Justice until 2000, when he was appointed Senior Law Lord. This position had customarily been held by the longest-serving Law Lord, but the then-Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, took the view that a more dynamic leader was required. Bingham was followed in the office of Lord Chief Justice by Lord Woolf, who had succeeded him as Master of the Rolls in 1996.

Bingham was a strong advocate for divorcing the judicial branch of the House of Lords from its legislative functions by setting up a new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which was accomplished under the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. The title of the office he held was re-designated as 'President of the Supreme Court' upon that court's establishment in October 2009, after Bingham had retired in July 2008. He is understood to have been 'very sorry' not to serve as its inaugural president.

His book, The Rule of Law, was published posthumously, by Allen Lane in 2010. It won the 2011 Orwell Prize for Literature.¹

I

Alan Macfarlane (AM): It's a great privilege and honour to talk to another old Sedberghian, Tom Bingham. Tom, I always start by asking people when and where they were born.

Thomas Bingham (TB): I was born in London in October 1933.

AM: How far would you like to go back. Could you tell me anything about your grandparents?

TB: My father's parents lived in Belfast, in the north of Ireland. They had four children, three daughters and a son. My father was obviously the son, and number three. My grandfather was an unqualified solicitor's clerk. My father left school at 14 and became a pupil teacher, which was a way of continuing your education in return for teaching younger children. He did that for about a year or two and decided that he did not want to be a teacher, but a doctor. He needed to matriculate and to pass in Latin, both of which he did phenomenally quickly. He qualified in medicine at Queens University where to study was cheap. He later went back and got a doctorate in medicine and a diploma in public health at the same time. He claimed to have been the only person to have done those two degrees at the same time, and then they stopped it!

He went to Wales to work and met my mother there. She was the youngest of four daughters. Her family history is quite long and unusual. Her father had gone out to California in the early days and started a ranch in the High Sierra. It was a big ranch and the four girls were born there. The family tradition was that he had the first herd of Hereford cattle, west of the Rockies. The family had come from the Isle of Man, to which they returned in 1903, when my grandfather's health failed – he died the following year. So, my mother was actually brought up by her mother in the Isle of Man and went to school in Liverpool. She also qualified in medicine and dentistry. (The ranch was passed to a younger brother who ran it until the 1930s when the Owens River was blocked to provide water for Los Angeles, and the valley.) She went to Swansea to work in South Wales, where she met my father, and got married.

This interview was conducted by Alan Macfarlane on 31 March 2009. The transcription for this interview has been provided by Radha Béteille, for this volume.

These interviews are available for viewing on:

https://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1113321

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4gQ2Ng9ZCg

AM: You have connections to Wales, because I see you have taken your Lordship's titles from Wales.

TB: We have a holiday house in Wales. I don't have a drop of Welsh blood. When I became Lord Chief Justice,² I found myself being asked to open a new county court in Swansea. At that time devolution was a hot topic, particularly in Swansea, they asked me to approve a plaque which said opened by the Lord Chief Justice of England, which was the formal title of the office. It just seemed to me a grotesque insult to the Welsh, so approached the Lord Chancellor³ to add Wales to the title, which was agreed. For the Welsh this reads 'of Wales and England'.

AM: Tell me something about your parents, their characters and how they influenced you, academically or in any other way.

TB: I was much closer to my mother in a way because our tastes and interests were similar.

AM: What were her tastes and interests?

TB: She liked reading and was interested in history although her education had been primarily scientific.

AM: Did you have brothers and sisters?

TB: I had an elder sister who died of breast cancer in New York about 20 years ago. Her husband was at one stage a fellow of King's, Robert Burridge, a mathematician.

AM: Is there anything to say before you went to your first school, about your infancy?

TB: No. Not really. We lived in Reigate in Surrey. My father became the Medical Officer of Health for Reigate, Surrey, in 1931. So, this was where I grew up.

AM: Where was your first school?

TB: I went to a kindergarten there, but I don't remember a great deal about it except that we had an extra term in the summer of 1940 because nobody could go away on holiday.

AM: Were you affected by the war at all?

TB: Yes. We were affected by the War as we were only 20 miles south of London so were on a flight route from Continental Europe. We slept in the scullery of the house which was fortified with huge pillars, and colossal doors which swung over the windows to prevent flying glass. My father wasn't usually there, but my mother, sister, the maid, who was part of the household, and I slept on mattresses there. This went on for a very long time.

AM: Did you at that very early age have any particular hobbies, ride into the countryside collecting things or read a lot?

TB: At that time, I neither had any particular hobbies nor read a lot.

AM: Let's take you on to your preparatory school, where was that?

TB: My preparatory school was called The Hawthorns and was in Redhill, about four miles away, on the way to Merstham. It was a large yellow-brick house with quite extensive grounds which the headmaster had bought and turned it into a prep school in 1926. It had about 70 pupils, all boys.

AM: And boarding, was it?

TB: There were three options, you either boarded full time or you boarded for the week or you were a day boy. A majority were day boys and a quarter were boarders. I was a weekly boarder.

AM: Do you remember anything about the school, any outstanding events?

TB: Again, the War plays a certain part in it. I went there in September 1941 and earlier that year a bomb had landed in the grounds. This was a large event in the life of the boys who were either there when the bomb fell or you weren't. There was nothing you could do if you hadn't been there when the bomb fell. It didn't kill anybody. We all used to sleep in the cellars, certainly for a couple of years. It was humane. They lacked able-bodied young men to teach so had some women and some recycled colonial veterans. I remember in 1944 when playing cricket, a V1 appeared overhead and the engine cut out which meant it would nose dive and blow up. We looked around apprehensively and the old colonial who was supervising, waved his stick and said, 'Play on boys!'.

AM: There were no beatings?

TB: There was corporal punishment but the Headmaster used it rarely.

AM: You mentioned cricket, were you beginning to get interested in games at all?

TB: I was very bad at games and the school was not much better. We usually lost more matches than we won.

AM: After that you went to Sedbergh, it's a long way away from Redhill.

TB: I went to Sedbergh largely because my parents did not want me to go to the school the Headmaster recommended. I did the scholarship exam for Sedbergh which was a week before. In those days the schools were all divided into two and scholarships were taken for each group a week apart. The school the Headmaster favoured was in the second group, so my parents said I should do a practice run in the first group. My mother selected Sedbergh from the list, largely because she had friends whose brothers had been there. She'd not been there, but she liked the sound of the place and it wasn't sissy!

AM: Can you remember your first arrival at Sedbergh?

TB: I first saw it when I went to do the scholarship exam and we stayed in the sanatorium. I was struck by the attractiveness of the place and how large everybody seemed to be. I remember my interview with J.H. Bruce Lockhart,⁴ in his garden, where he asked questions about the independence of India, which was a live topic in the summer of 1947. I was actually spending a term at a coeducational sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Transcription
• Introduction
• Law and Justice
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• Appendix 1: Biographical information
• Appendix 2: Legal and historical information