 So good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this afternoon session. I'm following that extremely interesting morning session. I'm delighted to welcome you to the afternoon one, which promises to be equally inspiring. This session is going to be divided in two. In the first part, Professor John Bell will speak first about the changing character of comparative law. And he will be followed by Professor John Spencer, who will talk about his involvement with cells. And the development of EU criminal law. This first session is going to be moderated by my colleague Dr. Sophie Turin, who is a fellow of Marie Edwards and a lecturer here in the faculty. Her research interests cover EU law, comparative law, and public law. She's the author of a monograph and the co-author of another on the subject of judicial independence. And she has also contributed very generously to the work of cells in a number of capacities, in her capacity as member of the management committee, one of the editors of the Cambridge yearbook, and also has led very successful visits to the EU institutions on behalf of cells. So with great pleasure, I leave the floor now to John Bell, John Spencer, and Sophie Turin. Thank you. I thank you all for your very generous introduction. It is my great pleasure to introduce our next speakers, Professor John Bell and Professor John Spencer. I have worked closely with them over the years, and so I fear that I'm fearful of not doing them full justice in introducing them. But I can at least mention their role within cells. John Bell and John Spencer have had a hugely influential role within cells, and they have at various times acted as director, co-director, and all co-director of cells. They have also contributed to the Cambridge yearbook of legal studies on a regular basis. And why don't Spencer introduce the Erasmus program at the law faculty as long ago as 1992? John Bell in later years would be ready to teach our students comparative law on their return. So they could actually exploit much of what they have learned abroad and develop their interests further. And it strikes me that in some of the universities, Erasmus students might have their eyes open to another European legal culture during their year abroad. All they need to have them firmly closed again upon their return in their university and not in Cambridge, I'm pleased to say. Much that our distinguished speakers have in common, they are going to talk on different subjects this afternoon. And John Bell will talk first about the changing character of comparative law. John himself has greatly contributed to opening the fields of comparative law beyond private law and to other disciplines, such as that of social legal studies. I gather that he will speak on how it might further expand in the near future and the extent to which comparisons with European countries might continue to dominate in that field. John Spencer will follow with a talk on European criminal justice. John has recently been awarded a CBE and some notes with amusements that the award seems only to relate to his work on children evidence, on his longstanding work on children evidence, and not on his much more recent work on how the UK benefits from close cooperation with Europe in criminal justice matters. As ever, John has more to say on this subject and we need more than ever to hear expert views on how to manage our relationship with Europe in this crucial area. So without further delay, I first invite John Bell to speak and then John Spencer. Thank you, Sophie and Albertina. You've got John's, I won't be using PowerPoint, which is unusual. This is usually considered to be the graveyard slot immediately after lunch. And the title of our conference is the Past, Present and Future of European Legal Studies. And Bill talked about much of the evidence for what sells in its early days being Christmas cards. So I feel that I have been introduced to you as Jacob Marley, the ghost of Christmas past. What I will be talking to you about is in sort of three sections, the who, the what, and the why of comparative law. And I will tend to take it a bit more nationally than simply yourselves. So who's conducting comparative law? If we look to the comparative lawyers of the 1980s before sales existed and their writings, it was predominantly done by men who were British-educated. People like Neville Brown, Tony Jollivet, Bernard Rodden, John Bridge, Barry Nicholas, Tony August, Jack Kampson, Jeffrey Samuel, most of them Cambridge-educated. There were a few foreign-educated people, particularly Emmy Grace, Bernakas, Kurt Lipstein, Karn Freunt, Eseniruchu, Basil Marcosines. Again, many of them Cambridge. It was their wartime and post-war military service and learning foreign languages among the British people who'd gotten their languages and that focused their work on Europe and fostered comparative law as a rebuilding exercise. Contemporary comparative lawyers are, to a great extent, foreign-educated and female. We have Sophie. But we also have Sophie Boireau, Miriam Anteena, Simon Glenert among the French, among the Germans, Mathias Seims, Jan Scherper, Felix Steffek, Birke Hecker, Italians, Paola Nebia, Alexandra Brown, and so on. The expansion of universities in comparative law has predominantly been from the foreign-educated cohort. They're probably the same number of comparative lawyers these days compared with the 1980s who are British-educated, but that doesn't account for the majority of the people who do the subject these days. If we kind of ask why, I'm going to offer suggest a few reasons. The first reason why the profile has changed, I think, is language. The British-educated systems have not fostered the study of foreign languages, but particularly foreign-European languages, so the capacity to conduct original research on resources in those original languages has, in relative terms, at least declined. When I started teaching in Leeds in 1989, Oxford, Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham all had courses on comparative law with materials in French, untranslated. That has almost completely disappeared across the country. Glasgow was also another place where that happened. Attempts in the 1980s to launch degrees in law and Chinese and law and Japanese completely founded at the year 2000. So the second reason is the RA, the Research Assessment Exercise. The reason for that is foreign-educated lawyers, particularly post-1992, became attractive because they had publications from their doctorates. And there were very few UK doctorates in law, and they continue to be very few doctorates in law, in any subject, especially comparative law. When I assessed the 2008 RAE, I had over 100 items in languages other than English to read, which was a very significant part of my workload. The third reason for the change in profile was Erasmus. The linguistic preparation for Erasmus funded by the EU meant that it brought over people to provide language courses to educate the young people going out to different countries, and that then created a resource of people who were then doing research in the UK universities. The fourth big reason was that the good linguists of the cohort 10 years younger than me, so from the 1980s, studied EU law. EU law offered an entry into an exciting multilingual projects across Europe. And unlike my cohort, there were actually places where you could teach EU law. Myself and my brother were never allowed to teach EU law because there was no demand. So there's a big change in that sort of situation. And the final aspect of the change in comparative law about who's doing it has been the growth in the last sort of 15 or so years in comparative common law. Not least in this faculty with the Public Law Center, Public Law Conference, but equally before that the Obligations Conference are situations where the common law is no longer English law applied in other countries. They are distinct legal systems with distinct ideas and you've got people now seriously comparing Australian and Canadian law in terms of their constitutions but also in that application of the law of obligations. And so there has been a shift in what is done and who is doing it. As I'll mention later, there's also been the increase in collaborative research, but I'll come back to that. If we then say, well, what is being studied as comparative law? 25 years ago, much of comparative law in this country focused on private law. It remains and still does remain the classic area for courses on comparative law looking at the opportunity that that provides to contrast codified legal systems from the uncodified common law in the law of obligations. It avoids, of course, large tracts of the air law which are statutory in all legal systems but it provided the sort of classical contrast that you could have tracked back from the 1980s back to the 1900s, if not beyond. The other body of comparative law that was being done at that time was on administrative law. From dicey onwards, the debate on whether English law had an administrative law was conducted by way of a contrast with French and German laws. And there was that debate particularly instigated by dicey about rejecting the idea that English law had a distinctive administrative law. John Allison in his work on dicey has shown very clearly that dicey himself knew the picture was considerably more complex. And John's work on dicey's lectures on comparative law is well worth reading. But it set a kind of tenor of the debate throughout the following century. Jack Hanson here in the 1950s at Neville Brown from Cambridge originally and Jack Garner as well as John Mitchell in the 1960s and 1970s all presented the institutional structure of French administrative law as providing a system of redress which did not exist in English law. But nowadays there's been quite a shift in the focus of comparative law research. Yes, there are still significant writers who are writing on the law of obligations. Now Simon Whitaker, John Cartwright, Marcel N. Rowan, Paula Gillica, Birka Hecker, Hector McQueen, Sandy Steele are very strong in those fields and across a range of age groups. But the foreign educated lawyers have bought a much richer range of fields, of interest. Firstly, within private law people like Jan Scherp on family law seems and stuff like on commercial law, howls and nought howls on consumer law. There's a broadening of what counts as private law. There's also John Spencer and Matt Dyson on areas like criminal law. But EU law and especially the European Convention on Human Rights have boosted the study of comparative public law. Fair grieves work on public law liability, are a very large range of writers on things like proportionality, looking at the way in which either EU law or the European Convention have altered domestic law. And so you have worked by people like Birk on the implementation of the Convention in different legal system areas. Work there is just illustrative of that sort of work. So there's been a broadening of the range and particularly pushing into constitutional law. But apart from the difference in the subject matters there's been a different difference in approach. As part of the professionalization of scholarship particularly in conversation with other disciplines there's been a much greater emphasis on research methodology. And the classical model of what has existed for over a century, the World Congress of Comparative Law is you write a questionnaire, you send it around to different countries, you get a summary of the law in each of the different countries and then one person, some of that Sophie or me or whatever has to write an overview report to produce some kind of synthesis. But encouraged by German scholarship and by American scholars as well as by our need to justify our methodology to the academy both within law and to other social science disciplines. UK scholars have been forced to articulate a lot more about their methodology and we need to contextualize the understanding of legal systems. Can one study comparative administrative law without an understanding of the context of public administration and the cultures of public administration? And the collection published by CUP by Adams and Bonhoff gives us a good illustration of the way comparative lawyers have changed in their self understanding of what's the right kind of methodology to adopt. So there's been a big change not only in subject matter but also in the professionalization of legal methodology. If I come to the why of comparative law, I think more fundamentally than all of I've already talked about is there's been a change in the shift in the intellectual ambition of comparative law. Many of the writers in the first half of the 20th century saw themselves as kinds of explorer who were bringing back tales from exotic lands, foreign countries and foreign legal systems. Their job was primarily to provide information, that model of the World Congress of Comparative Law, which even when it met in Bristol in 1998, had that same approach. But the information gathering model is not satisfactory. It doesn't meet the high standards of modern scholarship. And when a journal editor gets an article which says these are some interesting developments in a particular legal system, the journal editor writes back saying, so what? Why should anybody be interested? What's the point? The valuable comparative law has got to be analytical and not simply descriptive. It's got to be evaluative. The questions are what do we learn about this kind of problem through comparison of different legal systems? And what do we learn about the nature of particular legal systems and their legal methods? Descriptive information is only the starting point, not the end of the endeavor. And I think what the younger scholars, particularly those who are foreign educated abroad, is that extra rigor to the nature of comparative law. Martin Loughlin wrote an interesting article entitled The Importance of Elsewhere, in which he lamented the grass is greener approach, but saw value in looking at other legal systems to get a better vantage point on one's own legal system. Hugh Collins made a similar point in his review of Zweigert and Kurtz's book, that much of the learning from comparative law is actually in a better understanding of one's own legal system. To be fair, this grass is greener approach of works like Hampsons did have some success in sharpening ideas about administrative law or about restitution. Peter Birx's work owes a lot to that, as it were, work of Reinhard Zimmerman and others. And equally, there have been similar things on the improvements of court procedure. But it would be fair to say that comparison within the common law legal family has been more influential in the shaping the subjects than comparison with our European neighbors. Our European national legal systems have been influential indirectly through their contributions to EU and your ECHR law. And it's that the ideas that are kind of received through those two systems, and then downloaded, that has been a very influential way in which a UK law has been shaped. The ambition of comparative law for the periods from the 1970s to the 1990s was to find commonalities, especially within EU legal systems. The harmonisation process, which was talked about this morning in the creation of the single market, spawned projects to develop a European civil code. And a lot of interesting work was done under the leadership of people like Kotziol in Austria or Fombaar in Germany in these areas. And this culminated in the Reading proposal for a common European sales law, which he talked about in a Mackenzie Stewart lecture a few years back. Similar concerns have affected family law. The ECHR and a common body of rights has exerted pressure for commonalities in criminal procedure, such as the right to a lawyer, family law, the rights of transactuals or privacy. Much of comparative law happens upstream of these Strasbourg decisions in the preparation. But the European sales law project met with lots of criticism for the policy choices it made. The same was true of the Fombaar proposals for a common European code. The conclusions of comparative law, dressed up as common principles, recognized by the laws of member states, were criticized by as being really policy choices of what one member, a French member of the European Court of Justice, described as the most advanced legal positions, classifying legal systems into advanced and not advanced. Differences were swept under the carpet. And similarly, the analysis that's been made of the application of the Product Liability Directive are an indication, equally, of the way legal systems start to adopt divergent positions, not withstanding maximum harmonization. But least stimulated by Pierre Le Grand, that has been a move towards the recognition of the importance of differencing comparative law. And I would say that the current agenda of comparative lawyers is about understanding difference rather than looking for commonalities. It chimes with the work on human rights, where there's a great deal of emphasis now in understanding the margin of appreciation doctrine, that pushed lawyers to recognize that common rights does not mean common rules. And much of the project that David Ibertson and I, with a great deal of help from cells, conducted on the development of tort law, was about understanding why different legal systems took different directions when dealing with similar social problems. And Marx's view would suggest that the base and the super, it explains the superstructure, the law. That doesn't seem to work. A sociological suggestion would be that the social problem dictates the legal answer. That doesn't work. This, there are things that lawyers do with a degree of autonomy, which can lead to different solutions. So I come to the issue of Christmas yet to come. Where's comparative law going? I think, first of all, comparative law is increasingly a matter of working in teams rather than working individually. This will become vitally necessary when we look, as people were suggesting this morning, more globally, and where we don't have the linguistic understanding. It would be much more a question of bringing people together with the variety of legal skills going beyond Europe means that the language skills are likely to be scarcer. But also in the era of Brexit, comparative law may have a new agenda. EU law is about to be put in the foreign legal system section of the library. And this will generate an interesting inquiry. One of the bits of advice that I'm currently having to give is about the EU withdrawal bill, which contains the concept of retained EU law, defined as EU law on the 29th of March, 2019, or as I described it to the Welsh Assembly as zombie EU law. It will, it died on that day, but continues to rule very significant things like devolution for many years to come. And the question would be how zombie EU law compares with living EU law as it develops in the EU 27. What's up for comparative lawyers? What will be the interesting question or what are the dynamics that either retain similarity or lead to difference between those two bodies of what were originally common law? Is it going to be the result of different policies or the approach of different groups of lawyers who were one subject to the common European Court of Justice? Interesting questions. On that note, I'm glad that I am the ghost of Christmas past and I can now pass on to the more hopeful presenters.