Lord Woolf has witnessed ‘the transformation of almost every aspect of the legal scene’

For many people, the name Lord Woolf will always be synonymous with the revolutionary reform of the civil court code in the late 1990s: the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR).

In The Pursuit of Justice, his collection of essays and lectures edited by Christopher Campbell-Holt, we are offered an intriguing insight into the mind of one of the country’s leading lawyers.

For the last 15 years Lord Woolf has held pretty much every senior role in the judiciary, including the offices of Master of the Rolls and Lord Chief Justice, which gives him a unique understanding of what has for many lawyers – not to mention the judiciary – been a particularly contentious period for judicial reform.

In that regard this book covers judicial and political minefields across which Woolf has personally strode, including access to justice, terrorism, asylum, human rights, prisons, the rule of law and the British constitution.

Woolf himself makes reference to his career in the law as a time when he was ‘able to witness the transformation of almost every aspect of the legal scene’.

‘The scale and the rapidity of the change were without precedent. A legal system that had evolved over at least 800 years was transformed by being bombarded with change both from within and without.’ His view is one with which many lawyers in practice would sadly concur.

Positives and negativesWoolf is an exceptional talent and his papers provide a delightful and easy commentary on the judicial and legal reforms of recent decades.

In many ways, this book should be a required read for any student intent on a career in the law. Not only does it deal with the positives of the profession, but also the negatives. Reference is made to falling legal aid rates and the stresses of litigation generally.

However, these essays are not solely based around the CPR, nor litigation; they explore other legal and political challenges, and that balance between the separation of powers. In particular, Woolf reflects that many of his proposals, initially supported by the executive, were not in fact taken forward, such as on sentencing, prison reform and civil justice.

The impression is left that Woolf emerged somewhat frustrated with regard to his and the judiciary’s ‘sparring’ with government over this time. He labours on his hope, in part fruitless, of finding a consistent and workable concept of partnership between the two. You see throughout these lectures a real tension between what he believed he could achieve in such a relationship with ministers and the politically influenced reality created by MPs fawning to a mob-focused media.

To that end, the irony of The Pursuit of Justice is that in many ways the judiciary appears as much at a loss as the rest of us in finding that elusive balance.

Jason M Hadden is a solicitor-advocate and presenter with BPP