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The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law by Albie Sachs
No judge has written a book such as this before. Mind you, Albie Sachs is no ordinary judge. He was detained in solitary confinement in apartheid South Africa and then, when in exile in Mozambique, blown up by a bomb that cost him his right arm and the sight of one eye. He played an important part in the drafting of the new South African Constitution, especially its Bill of Rights and, in 1994 was appointed a Constitutional Court judge.
Sachs is also unusual in that he believes that the law ought to have a sense of humour, admits to gaining inspiration in his bath, believes that every judgment that he writes tells a lie against itself (of which more below), and even admits to crying out of the pleasure a particular judgment evoked.
The book consists of commentary and excerpts from Sachs’ and other judgments, drawn upon to illustrate the role law should play in guiding the new South African values of equality, human dignity, proportionality and the rule of law. He also explains the rationale behind the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and how the notion of reconciliation influenced a number of his or the court’s judgments (such as to require libel victims to seek an apology rather unrealistic damages, or to require a local authority to seek first to mediate with people it intends to evict from their homes).
Sachs becomes most emotional (and here is when he admits to crying) when relating how his court came to enforce the controversial socio-economic rights (such as the right to housing and healthcare) written in to the Bill of Rights.
He tells of Mrs Grootboom, who sought to enforce the right to housing. She represented claimants who had been dispossessed of their land under the old regime but, six years into the new regime, were still living in shacks. The court in that case was careful not to second-guess the primary decision-maker on the allocation of resources (these matters being reserved to elected representatives of the people). Nevertheless, it was held that the Government had not sufficiently respected the dignity of the claimants by failing reasonably to provide a comprehensive plan to alleviate their plight.
Sachs boldly engages with the issue of judicial method, cutting a swath through decades of jurisprudence on the subject of how judges decide. It is here that he considers that his judgments are a lie — not because they lack integrity, but because they give a false impression of authority and certainty, covering up the doubt and contestation involved in the intuitive process of “discovery” (which differs from the more objective process of “justification”).
Unfortunately, as Sachs mentions in his final chapter, Mrs Grootboom died recently, still in a shack some nine years after winning her case. And last year a high official of the ANC called the judges of the Constitutional Court “counter-revolutionaries”.
We can only hope that the democratic foundations laid by Sachs and the Constitutional Court will prove sufficiently sturdy to withstand such attacks, and that the crying in Sachs’s beloved country will continue to be out of pleasure rather than pain.
The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law by Albie Sachs, Oxford University Press, £19.99
Review by Jeffrey Jowell
*******
Baby Barista and the Art of War by Tim Kevan
This book’s genesis is in an anonymous blog started in 2007. The book emerges as a cross between The Talented Mr Ripley, Rumpole and Bridget Jones’s Diary.
The reader is pitched into Baby Barista’s manipulative, scheming and, often, downright evil battle to gain tenancy over his competing pupils. The plot burns up the pages and the characters that range within are all highly observed and coloured with Kevan’s acerbic wit.
Few people have names other than the nicknames bestowed by Baby Barista. This technique alone seduces smiles. They include Old Smoothie and The Vamp; there is a junior clerk “Fancies Himself”, while solicitors provide the characters of “Slippery Slope” and “Cliche Clanger”. There are some decent moral legal figures such as Old Ruin and The Busker. However, it is the selfish, lying, money-grubbing and duplicitous lawyer characters who dominate the narrative.
It would have been refreshing if Kevan had lingered longer over his decent lawyers to counterbalance his voracious characters. However, the emphasis on the grotesque does have the effect of ratcheting up the plot.
Ultimately, the book is a gallop of a read. It is a clever legal romp, a comedy mixed with ruminations about life, liberally peppered with black humour and layered in farce. It firmly proclaims, and disclaims, that it is fiction but there are many Bar absurdities from which Kevan has accurately drawn. As to whether any of the cast represent generic legal characters lurking in the profession, all I can say is that you may very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment.
Baby Barista by Tim Kevan, Bloomsbury Publishing, £11.99
Review by Kirsty Brimelow
*******
Benchmark: Life, Laughter and the Law by Oliver Popplewell
Sir Oliver, the retired judge, came to the law, via Charterhouse and Cambridge, through reading Cases in Court by Sir Patrick Hastings. Benchmark is his own offering to the genre.
However, while the account of his early life and career has moments of interest, it takes up too much of the book. It is only when Popplewell becomes a judge, at the age of 56, that his story really comes to life.
One of his most infamous cases was that of Jonathan Aitken, the former MP, who brought a libel action against The Guardian. Popplewell, who tried the case without a jury, deals with the episode in a short chapter, in which the late George Carman, QC, is described as acting for both plaintiff and defendant. Although versatile, even Carman could not have managed that.
He did, of course, act for the defendant and Aitken was forced to abandon the case after damning evidence came to light when he was on the brink of calling his teenage daughter to give false evidence on his behalf.
Until then, Aitken had been one of the most polished witnesses seen in a modern libel trial. Indeed, some believed Popplewell had been taken in by his performance, though he says: “It was obvious to me at a very early stage, without other evidence, that this was a wholly improbable story.” It is my experience that juries are better than judges at identifying liars.
I found Popplewell a calm, compassionate and a model judge — and these qualities are reflected in the tone of his memoir. It may have slightly missed the mark for me but it has in it something for everyone interested in the human as well as the legal story.
For those of us who did not go to university, it seems slightly excessive for Popplewell to have gone up to both Cambridge and Oxford, albeit more than 50 years apart. His book, Hallmark: A Judge’s Life at Oxford, chronicles his recent sojourn as a mature student of PPE after finding himself between jobs at the age of 76.
Unsurprisingly, Popplewell found the level of debate in tutorials frustrating since his knowledge of politics surpassed that of those around him, except the legendary Vernon Bogdanor, Oxford Professor of Politics and Government. Popplewell, however, is a man who makes the best of everything — from shooting to dining to cricket — and draws entertaining sketches of the legal luminaries he knew.
This highlights the problem with this book. The Oxford material soon wears thin, forcing Popplewell to stray into territory covered in his first memoir.
Benchmark (£12.99) and Hallmark (£20), by Oliver Popplewell, IB Tauris & Co
Review by Ronald Thwaites
*******
The Old Devil Clarence Darrow: the World’s Greatest Trial Lawyer by Donald McRae
At 67 Clarence Darrow defended Leopold and Loeb, 19-year-old killers who murdered, in their words, as “an experiment”. The trial was the final act in the rehabilitation of the American attorney, who had narrowly avoided being disbarred over allegations of bribing juries. The case, which inspired Hitchcock’s film Rope, revealed the defendants as cold, amoral killers. In saving them from being hanged, Darrow displayed the dogged tenacity that would hold him in good stead when he was to defend John Scopes in the notorious Monkey Trial of 1925.
McRae has captured the essence of this complex man. He lays the troubling foundation of Darrow’s work, laced with allegations of bribery, illicit affairs and cynical determination, upon which he built a legacy of real compassion. “Hate the sin,” he said, “but never the sinner.”
McRae, who was brought up in South Africa, says “the themes of political and religious fundamentalism, racism and violence, injustice and capital punishment that Darrow encountered in 1920s America, chimed eerily with the backdrop of apartheid”.
Many will recognise Darrow’s work through Spencer Tracey’s portrayal of the advocate in Inherit the Wind, focusing on the prosecution of a school master for teaching the theory of evolution. This book strips away the Hollywood gloss on the man and leaves us with a very modern person, ahead of his time. On his 76th birthday, shortly before his death, he asked: “Capital punishment is deliberate and cruel. Why can’t we have more tolerance in the world?”
The Old Devil by Donald McRae, Simon & Schuster, £18.99
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