Michael Zander

The law-making process

As a critical analysis of the law-making process, this book has no equal. For more than two decades it has filled a gap in the requirements of law students and others taking introductory courses on the legal system. It deals with every aspect of the law-making process: the preparation of legislation; its passage through Parliament; statutory interpretation; binding precedent; how precedent works; law reporting; the nature of the judicial role; European Union law; and the process of law reform. It presents a large number of original texts from a variety of sources – cases, official reports, articles, books, speeches and empirical research studies – laced with the author’s informed commentary and reflections on the subject. This book is a mine of information dealing with both the broad sweep of the subject and with all its detailed ramifications.

The Green Paper and beyond

I was invited to deliver my remarks about this magisterial work by Professor Rick Abel at the conference, but, to my great regret, owing to absence abroad I am unable to be present. I pay fulsome tribute, as I am sure all speakers will, to Abel’s remarkable grasp of the subject. The scope, the depth and breadth of his source material is impressive. For someone from outside the system to have such mastery of the material is unusual. Anyone interested in the history of the English legal profession is now doubly indebted to him—first The Legal Profession in England and Wales in 1988 and now this second great tome. The book deals with the English legal profession in the decade from Lord Mackay’s Green Papers in January 1989 to Lord Irvine’s Access to Justice Act 1999. Chapter 1 (‘Party Politics’, pp. 1–32) sets the political scene. The first 25 pages hardly mention the legal profession. They succinctly profile in turn some of the main political ideas and projects of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Old Labour and Tony Blair. Whose idea was it anyway? In the last section of the chapter, entitled ‘Politics and Lawyers’ (pp. 25–32), Abel considers first why did Thatcher turn on the lawyers (pp. 25–32) and then why did Labour under Blair basically continue the lawyer bashing (pp. 30–32). The first ‘rupture’, the Green Papers, occurred in Thatcher’s third term.