Who is This?

Marcel Berlins is a legal commentator who is best known for his weekly column in The Guardian newspaper. He is also a lecturer in media law at City University, London. He was the presenter of BBC Radio 4's legal programme Law in Action and retired after 15 years in 2004.

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Knock it on the head, BBC. Judges don't use gavels

I've been watching BBC1's Garrow's Law: Tales from the Old Bailey, with some pleasure. It is based on a real barrister, William Garrow, a pioneer of the art of cross-examination and a fearless advocate in the defence of prisoners and other unfortunates, ...

From MARCEL BERLINS, Guardian Unlimited,  22 Nov 2009

Related Topics: BBC

The week’s crime fiction: November 21, 2009

Seeking isolation, Sarah Fortune — Frances Fyfield’s attractively eccentric heroine lawyer turned very selective hooker (a small clientele of men she really likes) — rents a seaside cottage belonging to her friend Jessica’s mother. Jessica herself ...

From MARCEL BERLINS, Times Online,  20 Nov 2009

Related Topics: James Lee Burke,  Elmore Leonard,  George Clooney

Writ large: cautionary tale of spot fines gone awry

Criminal trials cost money, and money is what the government is trying hard not to spend. For one thing, if you cut down on their number, you don't have to pay lots of lawyers. Criminal trials also use up a lot of the police's time, spent giving ...

From MARCEL BERLINS, Comment Is Free,  15 Nov 2009

Related Topics: BBC,  Jack Straw,  Alan Johnson

Beware of the barrister: not a happy beast

I have recently been forced to take evasive action whenever I've spotted any barristers moving in my direction. I can no longer bear to listen to the litany of complaints that I know will emerge from their fevered lips. Only those who practise in the ...

From MARCEL BERLINS, Comment Is Free,  8 Nov 2009

Naming and shaming carries a heavy price

The trouble with the government's fashionable preoccupation with "naming and shaming" is that there's no evidence it works. Indeed, there's quite a lot to suggest the opposite. When magistrates started using their discretion to disclose the names of ...

From MARCEL BERLINS, Comment Is Free,  18 Oct 2009

Related Topics: Jack Straw

A reluctance to court celebrity

How many English judges or lawyers are known to the public at large? How many, outside the legal world, can name the chief justice, the master of the rolls or the head of the new supreme court? And what about barristers and solicitors? How many of them ...

From MARCEL BERLINS, Comment Is Free,  4 Oct 2009

Related Topics: Tony Blair,  Jack Straw,  Margaret Thatcher,  Michael Mansfield,  Helena Kennedy

Our new supreme court is a judge short – but far from underpowered

When, in a few days, the law lords who served as the United Kingdom's highest court of law are miraculously transformed into the justices of our brand new supreme court, they will be one short – 11 of them instead of the 12 required by law. Two months ...

From MARCEL BERLINS, Comment Is Free,  27 Sep 2009

Related Topics: House of Lords,  Supreme Court of the United States

Over the top on Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's dossier

Scotland's chief law officer, lord advocate Elish Angiolini, was wrong to "deplore the efforts by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to challenge his conviction through selective publication of his view of the evidence in the media". A 298-page dossier has been ...

From MARCEL BERLINS, Comment Is Free,  20 Sep 2009

What cost a free pardon for Shields?

The indications are that Michael Shields was innocent of the act of violence for which he was convicted and sentenced by a Bulgarian court. Certainly the legal process which led to his imprisonment was, by our standards, inadequate. So his release on a ...

From MARCEL BERLINS, Guardian Unlimited,  13 Sep 2009

Related Topics: Jack Straw

Naming Edlington pair would benefit no one

Some time in November, just after Mr Justice Keith passes sentence on the two Edlington brothers, aged 10 and 12, who admitted viciously attacking and torturing boys of nine and 11, he will be asked to lift the reporting restrictions that currently ...

From MARCEL BERLINS, Comment Is Free,  7 Sep 2009

Related Topics: James Bulger

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