Bringing Down Goliath: How Good Law Can Topple the Powerful

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The type of work has varied massively but the work hasn't been regular enough and often has me in different locations all over England at very late notice which isn't ideal. Those types of insults are very difficult to disprove because any effort to disprove it will own further your association with that characteristic. On my (woe is me) second read of the book, as I tried my best to approach this as a serious ideological document, Maugham’s view of the judiciary increasingly seemed to me to resemble that advanced (with similar bloviating and tedium) by Chinese president Xi Jinping. He’s correct to bemoan the government’s readiness to use its bottomless bank account to take bad cases repeatedly to court, especially HMRC in its obsessional pursuit of tax collectors’ rights. Already the largest legal campaign group in the UK, Good Law Project is shining light into corners the establishment would rather keep dark – from the failures of Brexit to the still-developing PPE scandal, to the tax arrangements of business giants like Uber.

In the same way as human rights are enshrined by the UK’s Human Rights Act - a touchstone for judges - this could provide an overarching code against which environmental damage is assessed. The government ought to be confronted and reined in, except where the government does something he likes (like the provision of gender medicine), in which case he condemns “judicial overreach”. Publicly available opinions of this book seem to depend heavily on whether the reviewer shares the author's political views. But the fundamental difficulty with the worldview of this book is the belief common to so many lawyers, which is that everything is resolvable by legal means. If anyone would like to take their chance on me I will promise to repay them with hard work and dedication.The judges of Scotland are wrong for not using the nobile officium in an unprecedented action to (pre-emptively) compel the government not to break the law in future, but when a ruling goes the other direction, and judges break new ground in a way that hurts the Good Law Project, Maugham demands restraint. The Harry Potter author spoke out after the left-wing lawyer reacted furiously to a Times review of his first book describing him as "a first-time author who should not be encouraged to re-offend ever again". We might see Maugham as an institutional agent of low liberalism, advancing this ideology in traditional institutions, albeit in a respectable garb. Maugham doesn’t just speak truth to corrupt and compromised power, he takes the fight to their front door and won’t be ignored.

In Bringing Down Goliath , he recounts campaigns for public transparency and victims of sexual assault. He explains some of the most important legal and constitutional crises of our times and why they needed to be understood. It is eye opening and sometimes a little depressing and frustrating to realise how poor our democracy and rule of law is. Critics say the declaration unfairly demonises barristers doing their job and is an empty gesture from lawyers (like Maugham, a tax specialist) who aren’t asked to prosecute climate activists.The reason why a river having ‘standing’ (sufficient interest to bring a case) is the right result is because treating the environment as a resource for humans leaves ecosystems unprotected, he says. The problem, however, is that Maugham doesn’t realise that the means of the rule of law are an end in themselves.