In a book ostensibly about the domestic legal system, Donald Trump looms large.
Public understanding and appreciation for individual rights have not only been debased, they have been debased to serve ideological ends (“misrepresentation or worse“). Where this book succeeds most brilliantly is explaining how much fake law matters and setting the problem in a broader context. Lawyers in those fields need no help diagnosing the illness. The tour d’horizon includes family, personal injury, employment, human rights and the constitution. It was not a notable success, but one or two of those old fact checks are cited in Fake Law by the Secret Barrister, now the authoritative account of public legal miseducation, its causes and its cures.Īlthough the anonymous author is (we are assured) a criminal specialist, crime is not the sole focus this time around. I once work on a fact checking project scrutinising fake news about the legal system, funded - like the admirable Transparency Project in the family law arena - by the Legal Education Foundation. Many lawyers blog for the public, others pursue corrections in the press. The government stresses, but does not fund, public legal education. Political attacks on liberal judges or activist lawyers reinforce cynicism and ignorance.Įfforts to address the problem are varied. The difficulty of easily stating what the law is or decoding a dense and controversial judgment hinders rapid rebuttal. A low base level of knowledge means that people are ill-prepared to interrogate false claims. The different forms of public legal miseducation feed off one another. “Misrepresentation or worse” is chiefly laid at the door of the press and politicians Theresa May’s “ catgate” speech to the 2011 Conservative Party conference is still the classic text, although it is less well remembered that the story started life in the Sunday Telegraph ( “Immigrant allowed to stay because of pet cat”). “Misunderstanding” arises from the inherent complexity of the law. “Ignorance”, to adopt Sir James’s blunt phrasing, arises from a lack of what is called public legal education: people do not know much about the legal system to begin with.
The problem affects all areas of law but takes different forms. Sir James Munby once warned that public confidence in the family courts, which he ran between 20, was undermined by “ignorance, misunderstanding, misrepresentation or worse”.
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