 So John, you were the 12th Good Heart Professor to be interviewed for the Indian Scholars Archive. You retired in 2016 as a Lord Justice of Appeal, having risen through the ranks of legal practitioners and the judiciary where you started as a barrister in 1971. You've been the Good Heart Professor of Legal Science for the academic year 2016-17. We are very grateful to you for agreeing to share some reminiscences of your life and your career as well as your experiences here in Cambridge over the last year. After summarising these activities, I hope that you can give us some thoughts on legal topics and notions with which you become associated through your published writings, particularly some topical constitutional issues. So could we start with your early life? You were born, Sir John, on the 10th of May 1945 as the Second World War ended. Yes, that was two days after VE Day. Apparently I was late and my mother was very angry that she missed all the parties. Where were you born? In Nottingham, where my mother's parents lived at the time. Were your parents involved in the law? No, they were both doctors. They were both in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the war time serving in Egypt. My mother came back pregnant and she had one of these strange things that apparently happened in pregnancy. Every time she saw a particular steward on the boat, she was sick but not otherwise. Is it from 1950 to 1963 you were at school? First at Durham Cathedral Choir and then at the Secondary Durham School. Any mentors that stand out from that period? Well, there were very good classics masters at Durham School. One was called Bobby Spitz and the other was the school chaplain called Jack Marston. And I think they, and also the Latin and Greek I learned at the choir school, the prep school, gave me a love of the classics, the ancient classics, which I've always had. What at that point were your main academic interests? Latin. That's surprisingly no doubt, but it was. I greatly disliked sport and still do. In 1963 you went up to Exeter College. Yes. And you graduated in 1967 with your BA. You wrote in 2004 that Lord Birkenhead's biography, and I quote, led me for the little that it is worth into the law. Now I wonder if you could expand on the circumstances of this very important event in your career. Well, my father had a copy of the really rather poor biography of Effie Smith, Lord Birkenhead, that had been written by Birkenhead's son. And I read it, or perhaps I only read some of it, and I don't recall as a young teenager. And I suppose I thought that as teenagers perhaps are inclined to, that this was a very romantic profession with a lot of contest in it. And I remember announcing to my grandfather on August the 1st of my 13th year that I was going to be a barrister. And I knew it was always the first because that was the day we always went up to North East Scotland for the summer holiday. You, this philosophy is one of your interests in whose whom. Did you read this philosophy at Exeter? I read what Oxford is called great at Exeter College Oxford. That is to say the ancient classics plus philosophy. And the course included quite a lot of modern philosophy, though I've been particularly interested ever since then in moral and political philosophy, which I think are disciplines that are intertwined with the law. And they've made a great deal of difference to my approaches to the law or views about the law for what that may be worth. Any influential teachers or lecturers that you remember from Oxford? Yes, too. There was a young Canadian called John Baker who was teaching the modern philosophy. And I don't remember any particular incident, but he was a very good teacher, very clear, very precise, and very encouraging. The ancient history tutor was an older man called Jacob Alston, a very well-known teacher amongst classicists. He was what you might call an archetypal bachelor don. The first essay I wrote for him was on Greek colonisation, I think, and as was the tradition, the undergraduate reads the essay to the don who listens and then comments on it. And I read this essay to Jacob Alston. He blew perfect smoke rings from his very long cigarette holder. And at the end of the essay, he said, this essay is like a souffle that hasn't risen. Now, after that, I'm sure I wrote other bad essays, but none that were quite so boring. So John, what were your ambitions for a career in law at that time? I don't know if I looked ahead very far. I certainly wanted to be a successful court advocate, the traditional route for the bar. I don't believe that when I was an undergraduate or a student, a law student a little later, I had any particular focused ideas about the bench. That came a bit later on. My energies were concentrated on practice of the bar in the traditional way, really, in common law chambers. So how did you proceed after your BA? Well, I took the degree of the Oxford Finals in 1967. I then came to London and was already a member of the inner temple, having decided to go to the bar and went through the bar exams and was called to the bar the inner temple in 1970. Pupilage 1970-71 and then I remained in the same chambers, general common law chambers they were, throughout my career until I went on the bench in 1992. As I say, they were general common law chambers, so one saw a very wide range of practice. But after some years, I got more involved in public law, administrative law, because a more senior person in my chambers, now Lord Brown of Eaton under Haywood, was the, what's called the Treasury Devil, that's to say the advocate, the member of the bar who is instructed in the major civil cases on behalf of the government, whatever political color it may be. And so some of the work he couldn't do for the government filtered down to me. And I succeeded him as Treasury Devil in 1984. And after that, I'd been doing a lot of public law cases and that became my major interest, I suppose.