Jeremy Wright’s rule of law: Justice shall not be sold – unless the price is right

Dicey? Bingham? Or perhaps you prefer the Wrightean doctrine of the Rule of Law as it operates in the UK? For Jeremy Wright (the Attorney General for those who’ve forgotten – or perhaps never knew) has given us his thoughts on this complex and contested legal principle.

Generally “the rule of law” might be boiled down to a simple phrase: No one is above the law – even the Government. This though, is not the quite message Mr Wright wishes to get across. His speech “on the UK’s long commitment to the Rule of Law” was delivered at the London Law Expo in the City of London. The Expo is a sort of legal/business fest with, this year, Dragons’ Den man James Caan as keynote speaker. Wright’s intended audience, therefore, was the business community – specifically the international business community. What excites Wright is less Britain’s commitment to the rule of law, forged through revolts and rebellions and the slow painful birth of a democratic society. No, what excites him is this: that

“the numbers show just how successful the legal services sector has been: in 2012 it was worth over £20 billion, or 1.5% of UK GDP and contributed some £4 billion in export value. There were over 300,000 people employed in our legal services sector with over 200 foreign law firms operating in London and elsewhere in the country”.

Britain, for these reasons, is not just a place to do business. It is a place to do law. So the point of  the rule of law is: it’s good for business. “Our long commitment to the rule of law I believe, is of central importance to the British economy”. For Wright has very little interests in the philosophy or practice of the rule of law; rather he is concerned to established Britain’s (or perhaps only London’s) unique selling point: “All companies know that they will be judged by clear rules applied in accordance with the law.” The rest of the speech is a promotion of UK plc’s legal services. Somehow he even manages to spin the Libor scandal as a “good” story:

Joan Edwards’ will: whose money is it anyway?

Joan Edwards was obviously one of those kindly but naïve souls who believe that governments do good and are capable, when using their discretion, of making good decisions about the use of other people’s money.

Her will, which left a £520,000 bequest to the UK government, shows her trusting nature – but did she make the intention of her bequest clear? Apparently not since the two governing parties were initially happy to split the money between them and then, within half a day of the bequest being publicised in the Daily Mail, somewhat miserably to hand it back.

But to whom should the money actually go? This seems, in modern American parlance, to be Trust Law 101: uncertainty of intention, risking making the bequest void – which would return it to the Edwards estate for a difficult decision about who the actual final recipient should be.