 It's my pleasure as the chair of the Cambridge Law Faculty to welcome you to the 2018 David Williams lecture. Where are we going? Reflections on the rule of law in a dangerous world to be given by the right Honorable Beverly McLaughlin. Well, it's indeed my pleasure to welcome you. The assignment is not as straightforward as you might think. My brief is to offer a praisey of the distinguished career of Sir David Williams, whom this lecture series honors, tell you about the founders of this lecture, and of course introduce our speaker. Each assignment in isolation is straightforward. What's challenging is to do my brief justice, and yet stick to time so as to ensure that we move with alacrity to the main event. That'll only happen if I get started now. Before beginning in earnest with my introduction, it's my pleasure to offer a special welcome to Lady Sally Williams, Sir David's widow, and the Williams family. Lady Sally plays an important role in the organization of this event, which provides a welcome opportunity for members of the law faculty and the university community more generally, to keep ties strong with the Williams family, which we very much welcome. Sir David Williams was born in Camarthen in Wales and was a pupil at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School. His passion for Wales stayed with him. He was delighted in 2007 to be appointed the first chancellor of Swansea University, having been president of the former University of Wales Swansea since 2001. After national service in the RAF, Sir David achieved first in history and law at Emanuel College here in Cambridge. He held academic posts in Nottingham and Oxford before returning to Emanuel College here in 1967, where he ultimately became senior tutor. Major works published in this era included the books Not in the Public Interest, the Problem of Security and Democracy, and Keeping the Peace, the Police, and Public Order, each marked by a cutting edge law in context analytical approach. Sir David became a reader in public law in 1976 and was elected president of Wolfson College here in 1980. In 1989, he became the first head of a non-traditional college to be vice chancellor of the university, which at that time was a post rotated amongst heads of houses of Cambridge colleges. There was momentum building in favor of the idea that the vice chancellor's ship should be a full-time executive post, and Sir David steered this reform through complicated decision-making procedures. He in turn became the first full-time vice chancellor serving until 1996. During his tenure, he was knighted and appointed an honorary QC. He reverted to a professorship in the law faculty until he retired officially from the university in 1998. When Sir David passed away in 2009, Alison Richard, then the vice chancellor, said, and I quote, a great scholar and a great leader, Sir David contributed to collegiate Cambridge in so many ways. As the first vice chancellor in almost 800 years to hold the position full-time, he was a real pioneer as well. We will all miss him greatly. One of the major tributes to his career was the launching in 2001 of the Sir David Williams annual lecture series. It was established under the edginess of the Center for Public Law with the encouragement and financial support of John Nolan, helped by Michael Russ. John Nolan, who passed away in 2017, was educated at the US Naval Academy in Georgetown University and went on to become a distinguished corporate litigation partner at the Washington DC law firm of Steptoe and Johnson. He spent a number of months at Wolfson College in the late 1980s when Sir David was head of house. Michael Russ, a graduate of Duke University School of Law, became a partner at King and Spalding in Atlanta, Georgia before moving to Johnson Management, a South Carolina-based group of companies focusing primarily on real estate activities. He had an extended research stint at Wolfson in 2001. Sandra Day O'Connor, a judicial pioneer as the first woman to sit on the US Supreme Court, was the first Sir David Williams lecturer. She was a fitting choice because Sir David had a longstanding love of the United States and had many admirers there, of which John Nolan and Michael Russ were just too. It's our pleasure to welcome another judicial pioneer from across the Atlantic as the speaker for 2018. The Red Onward Reverend McLaughlin was the first woman to hold the distinguished position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. She was appointed Chief Justice of Canada in 2000 and retired last year with Canada's longest serving Chief Justice. During that period, the Supreme Court heard cases involving a wide range of topical challenging issues, including assisted suicide, abortion, gay and lesbian rights, the rise in recognition of indigenous history and treaty rights, the clash of terrorism and civil liberties and strains on access to justice. Her service as the longest serving Chief Justice of Canada was marked within a few months of her retiring by her appointment as a companion of the Order of Canada. I thought a good way to bring to life Chief Justice McLaughlin's backstory was to quote a tribute from her co-author, Jim Taylor, which he wrote for the British Columbia Legal Journal, the advocate when she was appointed Chief Justice of Canada. I knew Jim, who passed away in 2016, as a colleague when I was embarking on my career as a legal academic at the University of British Columbia. Jim said of his co-author, her parents ranched and had a small logging operation in Pinscher Creek, Alberta. At the time, Pinscher Creek had an urban population of fewer than 2000 inhabitants. Bev's family lived 25 miles out of town in the foothills. Bev had the fortune to be raised in a family that had little money, but that was rich in all the important things. Bev was an outstanding student at the University of Alberta, where she took her Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in philosophy, Master of Arts degree in philosophy, and LLB graduating as the gold medalist in 1968. Our speaker practice in Alberta and then British Columbia before joining the UBC Law Faculty in 1974. Jim Taylor said, Bev was a marvelous faculty colleague and a great partner with whom to work, bright, energetic, hardworking, engaging, even-handed. She was always willing to do more than her fair share of the dog work and anxious to take less than her fair share of the credit. She was a dedicated and popular teacher. After seven years at UBC, Beverly McLaughlin began a meteoric rise through the ranks of the Canadian judiciary. In 1981, she was appointed to the Vancouver County Court. Over the course of the next seven years, she was appointed to the Supreme Court of British Columbia, followed by the British Columbia Court of Appeal. She was subsequently appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia and finally a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. While Chief Justice McLaughlin has stepped away from the Supreme Court of Canada, her work in the judicial realm continues. Earlier this year, she was appointed to the Hong Kong Final Court of Appeal as a non-permanent common law judge, alongside Baroness Brenda Hale, marking the first time women were appointed to this position. Chief Justice McLaughlin has also marked her retirement from the Supreme Court by embarking on a new career as a novelist. Full disclosure, a thriller featuring a female criminal defense lawyer in Vancouver, was published earlier this year by Simon and Schuster Canada. For the Sir David Williams annual lecture hover, she will return to the realm of non-fiction. We very much look forward to her lecture on where are we going, reflections on the rule of law in a dangerous world. We've indeed been looking forward to it longer than we normally would. We were all very sorry when Chief Justice McLaughlin's lecture had to be postponed in February due to circumstances beyond her or our control. We're doubly grateful to her for agreeing to return now. At the conclusion of the lecture, Professor Allison Young, Director of the Center for Public Law, will offer a few closing remarks and also help to conduct a Q&A with Chief Justice McLaughlin. Thank you very much and thank you to everyone for coming out. On a second occasion, all Lady Sally's children have had to be dragged out to meet me twice. That must be some sort of purgatorial sentence, but here they are and it's nice to see you again. And it's lovely to be back. I never made it into this room last time, but I do find it to be a splendid room and to be welcomed by the legal fraternity at Cambridge and particularly those interested in rights law and constitutional law is an enormous pleasure. And thank you, Brian, for that over kind introduction. It really is an honor to be asked to deliver this lecture in memory of Sir David Williams, whom I regard as one of the preeminent legal thinkers of the latter part of the 20th century and one of this venerable institution's most memorable scholars and administrators. I had the privilege of getting to know Sir David and Lady Sally Williams in the 1990s as a Canadian, one of those Canadians who periodically descend on Queen's College and turn everything upside down for what's called the Canadian lectures. Some of the fellows of the college run betting wars on how much red wine the Canadians will consume, but they're very happy because as they say, it's all good profit. Because of my frequent visits to Cambridge and I also have the honor now of being the visitor at Queen's College, Frank and I have become very fond of many people here, but among them were Sally and David in the early years. And now my dear friend, Steven Tube, who is here today, has filled David Shoes as vice chancellor and as I say, with my connection with Queen's College, I feel very at home here. David worked in a day before formal bills of rights and so on were fashionable. In looking at his work, however, I found many connections and I was struck by two themes that mark his mature work. The first was the theme of civil liberties. David took up the law of civil liberties early in his career. Until he did so, it had widely been regarded by lawyers as a random collection of interferences with freedoms. David took these musings and shaped them into a coherent body of legal thought. His particular insight was that freedoms, the freedoms we call civil liberties, are embedded in a political, social, and judicial setting which shapes and confines them and that to understand them, we must understand that matrix. And that indeed is a profound insight. Not only did he find a way to enhance civil liberties in an era when there weren't documents like bills of rights or charters to rest yourself on, he did it in a very sophisticated way. When we came to, when the Supreme Court of Canada came to interpreting the charter, it very quickly, these are people who were there before I realized that in interpreting rights, context, the social conditions in which they're set are of vital importance. The second and intertwined theme that I found emerging from David's work is that legislative, executive, and judicial branches of governance each have roles to play in articulating and applying civil liberties. As for most areas of the law, he was particularly interested in the interplay between the three branches of government in achieving respect for civil rights and even more particularly in the role of judicial oversight in defining and applying those rights. Starting from the premise that all laws arise from fallible human beings, he argued that lawmakers and the executive, for example, the policemen and decision makers must be subject to constant and principled scrutiny by the judicial branch of governance. So David's appreciation of the interplay between Parliament, the executive, and the courts was pro-cocious. He came to this subject before it became fashionable, once again, just as he did with civil liberties. In the intervening years, much has been written and said on the subject, yet it remains at the heart of our legal debates as we approach the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. Tonight, I would like to explore with you from a 21st century perspective, the twin themes so dear to David's heart, civil liberties in a free society and the interplay between Parliament, the executive, and the courts in defining and applying our liberties. The first question is what we mean by a free society. Politicians are fond of boasting and citizens of accepting that they live in a free society. But what precisely does the term mean? Different scholars offer different definitions, but at a minimum it seems to me a free society as a society that respects certain fundamental freedoms, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, the basic democratic freedoms of voting and holding public office, and the basic personal freedoms like freedom from arbitrary detention, arbitrary search and seizure, and cruel and unusual punishment. These are all values which have long been upheld in this country even before the Bill of Rights and hopefully after. There are two aspects to the definition of a free society I've just offered, the enumeration of the basic freedoms and an attitude of respect for those freedoms. Many countries have long lists of constitutional freedoms but do not respect those freedoms. With that respect grounded in the rule of law and upheld by an independent judiciary, all three branches of government are implicated in respecting freedoms. The legislature must respect these freedoms as it crafts its laws. The executive must respect them as they execute them and the courts must be there to ensure that the rights are upheld in their proper way. Now this is more difficult in a country like Britain where parliamentary supremacy is the ultimate principle. Nevertheless, the courts have found ways and scholars like David William found ways to ensure that there is, as Lord Bingham put it in his wonderful 2010 book on the rule of law, protection and irreversible protection for minimum guarantee of fundamental freedoms upheld by an independent and impartial judiciary. It was this judicial function that particularly interested Sir David Williams. His analysis of the relative contributions of each branch of governance led him to conclude that the courts were best equipped to formulate the legal and democratic principles essential to a well-functioning democracy and to do so in a manner more consistent he believed than the legislature. Parliament must strive to ensure that the courts it passes respect fundamental, that the laws it passes respect fundamental freedoms. The executive must act with the same respect. Thus Sir David emphasized the importance of judging police conduct against the standard of reasonableness about which I will say more later. But fundamentally the difficult task of fine tuning falls to the courts he believed. The judiciary was the best equipped and positioned to provide the constant scrutiny necessary to maintaining a free society. But this business of judicial scrutiny is a difficult one particularly in an era when courts are increasingly attacked and undermined by many forces. In the United States we have a president who calls his judges so-called judges when they rule against them. And the press here is sometimes not entirely uncritical of judges. But let me take you back to the Canadian experience and what we faced when we embarked on our rights exegesis under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter was adopted in 1982. Adopted is a nice verb that doesn't quite cover what happened because as the constitutional scholars here know it was really the British Parliament that did it. And if you want an explanation of that anomaly I'll refer you to your professors. But we were technically a non-independent at least in terms of the law of colony until that repatriation which took place at the same time the Charter was adopted. And suddenly the Canadian judiciary found itself faced with a new document unlike any they had seen before except in some of the legislative bills of rights with very high language talking about rights in general and rather absolutist terms freedom of democratic freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of expression as we called it, religious freedom and a host of other freedoms and no jurisprudence to interpret these freedoms. No cases to go to. We had got used as a post-colonial country to looking to England for guidance. But apart from Sir David's William writing on civil liberties and a bit of conversation about a reasonableness review there really wasn't a lot to go on. So what did the Canadian judges at that time do? I was appointed a judge in 1981. The Charter came in in 82. I was a lowly counter court judge so I never got near the Charter. But as the jurists I watched with interest what they did. And there was a lot of betting going on. The Canadian although law professors don't have much to bet, but they did. The Canadian Bill of Rights, which was a legislative document had been passed in the 50s, had been a terrible disappointment because it did not have constitutional status and because the court, the Supreme Court of Canada had taken a rather crap view of the rights. They interpreted them narrowly and they took the view that a statute which came after the Bill of Rights in effect repealed the guarantees or limited them. So you didn't get much relief under the Bill of Rights if you were looking for endorsement of your freedoms. But the Charter was a constitutional document. So the bets were on. Most people said this is not going to be widely, broadly interpreted. What's going to happen is that the same judges or the same court at least, which interpreted the Bill of Rights in such a narrow legalistic fashion will do the same with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But there was one big question, nobody knew what to do with this, right at the beginning of our Charter. After it gives you all these beautiful rights, Canadians, you've got all those beautiful rights, they're out there, enjoy them. The first section, section one says, the government can limit them provided they are, and you lawyers in the group tell me what this means if you really didn't know already, what we said it meant, justified reasonable, reasonable David Williams word, reasonable and justified in a free and democratic society. So what were we to make of that? You have all these rights, but the government could come along and say, we need to do this for reasons A, B, C and D, and we think it's justified, and in the spirit of parliamentary supremacy, you should give us the benefit of the doubt. And so that was the argument that section one, as well as the rights would be narrowly construed, and section one would be construed largely, and we would end up with a very ineffective Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Well, to my surprise, frankly, and the surprise of many, that was not to be the case. The Supreme Court of Canada, the Charter was adopted in 1982, the cases started coming out in 83, 4, and it became clear from the beginning that they were going to take a very broad and expansive view of the rights and that they were going to take a fairly critical idea of the notion of justification. Now, this two-part analysis, of course, springs from the fact that rights are never unlimited. If you go to the American Constitution, they say right off the bat, no law shall abridge freedom of speech. Well, we know what that means. They had to introduce various limits through the doctrine that developed of the constitutional meaning of freedom of speech in the First Amendment, and those limits were introduced internally in the rights. So, the Supreme Court of Canada had two choices as to interpretation of rights, and section one. It could have said, we're going to do a lot of the heavy lifting, a lot of the work, in the rights themselves, just like the Americans have done. And indeed, I listened to a professor from America in the early days who advocated that that's just what we should do. He said, you're going to get a more thoughtful, reasoned, precedent-based kind of development of your rights if you do the heavy lifting under the rights themselves. So you may wanna not follow our levels of scrutiny or whatever it is, but you should do a lot of analysis to determine what freedom of speech is protected and what is not, what liberty really means, what's protected under it, what is not, and do a lot of analysis under the rights. And then there won't be much work left to do in section one because most of the limits will be drawn under the rights and the section one will not come into play. The government, when it's arguing, its point will put most of the emphasis on limitations on the rights, and that's where you'll solve things. And this professor, Professor Pi, said, that's the way to do it. He said, this section one is a really strange beast. It's real loose and open, and it could lead you down the path of kind of open-textured judging, if some of you know that phrase, where values, amorphous values are put up against one another, and some people, critical people, obviously say, maybe the judges just made it up, maybe I would've put these values in a different way or ordered them in a different way. Anyway, we had that choice, Canada had that choice, and it decidedly went down the route of not doing very much definition under the rights themselves, not doing very much analysis under the rights, but saying, we'll take a broad approach to these rights, and then they'll be limited under section one. So the heavy lifting in many, many cases is done under section one, the justification section. Well, it is what it is, and I'm not here necessarily to say that with hindsight it was the best way. Many people think it was the best way to go. We certainly got a broad interpretation of rights. There were rights, of course, that contained their own limits, such as detention, reasonable detention, protection against unreasonable punishment, and those, of course, the court was forced to do something in there, and in a few others, like freedom of speech, it made a stab at determining what was covered, but for the most part, it was this broad, generous approach. So that brings us then to the problem of justification in constitutional law if you have this two-part test. And this has, this introduced the Canadian Supreme Court into a totally new area of legal thinking. I had been a judge before, I wasn't a judge before the charter, I've been a lawyer before the charter, but when I, like other judges, came up with the analysis, it came up, we're confronted by the analysis you had to do under section one, it was a different kind of judging. The Supreme Court of Canada in a case called Oaks decided to adopt what was essentially the European proportionality test, and I'm sure you are all familiar with that. But the idea being that you look to see whether the purpose served by the law that infringes the rights is one capable of overwriting the right, that's usually quite simple, it usually is, unless it's some sort of frivolous law. And then you look at whether the balance is right between the damage done if you wish by the right and the benefit of the, that it secures through that. And the first steps are connection, minimal impairment. Most of the Canadian law in the early years, and indeed you can say this in absolute terms, the section one analysis has been determined under minimal impairment. The government went too far. But quickly it became apparent that on social and political issues a great deal of deference had to be given to the government because there is money involved, there's policy involved, there are many complex decisions to be made in drafting a law that affects social or economic interests that are better made by parliament, which can have committees, which can marshal evidence and so on. So the court said that on those questions they would accord considerable deference. The result though has been that the court, Supreme Court of Canada has differed on section one in a significant by differed, I mean members have had different views on how section one should come out in a significant number of cases, perhaps higher than a jurisprudential scholar would think ideal. And this has to do with the open texture. At the very end of the game, if you haven't resolved it under minimal impairment, you've got to do this balancing between effects, benefits, detriments. And that's a very subjective process. That is not the kind of judging most judges are used to doing. We're used to taking a statute, some precise words, looking at what it means. But when you come to weighing benefits and detriments, I'm no longer a real judge, but I can say honestly now that it is very difficult work. And the discussions you have with your colleagues are very difficult because they're often very value laden, subjective. And as a judge, I always tried to strive for as much objectivity as I could get on a question. Putting myself above it, trying to put myself in the shoes of both parties, trying to make sure my subjective views didn't color it any more than necessary because I believe that's what the people are entitled to. They're not entitled to a single judge's view. But I have to say, I have to admit that section one and the proportionality test introduces a certain measure of subjectivity that possibly is very difficult to overcome. In the end, you have to make the tough call and you may defer to the government or the parliament on it, but there are cases where people will not. They say it's a basic matter of freedom of religion. It hasn't been justified. There could have been many other ways of doing it that are less intrusive and so on. I won't get into it, but problems of proof are also interesting if you are trying to, if you're on the side of the government, what do we do to justify this? So it's a whole area of jurisprudence. Now you're saying what has this got to do with any of us because we have a bill of rights, but very soon we won't have a bill of rights and where will we be? We will be back with Sir David Williams, I suppose, and the common law and the civil liberties. And where will all that lovely jurisprudence that has arisen under the bill of rights be? It will be an interesting time. It will be an interesting time for judges and judges of this country I am confident will maintain the basic rights and liberties that the people of this country have become that believe they are and are entitled to. The judges did this before the bill of rights and they will continue to do it. But speaking as a judge, it is easier to uphold rights if there's a piece of paper that has some quasi-constitutional or constitutional validity than if there's no piece of paper. So we will be watching from afar with great interest to see what happens. Of course it may be that there is substitute legislation or other measures. It could even be that at some far distant moment the United Kingdom will engage in a round of constitutional, have its constitutional moment and consider matters like asymmetrical federalism and bills of rights. But all that is for you and not for me to determine. I just couldn't resist the mentioning the very interesting situation, which this great country with its great and stalled right stirs Putin's will be interesting, will be entering before too long. Now what has all this proportionality got to do with Sir David Williams? Well, I would like you to think about this and it may be relevant to your future or it may not, but Sir David said in the end it all comes down to reasonableness. And when I go through the lengthy proportionality test and of course reasonable is in section one of the Canadian Charter. And with the experience that I have had, I think he was in a very profound sense right. The concept of reasonableness as it has developed in judicial review and as it is thought of even under our charter requires a certain balancing. It requires as I mentioned earlier that the analysis be fixed in the reality of the social and legislative context. But it may be that in your future, no one knows exactly how it will go in terms of rights. The concept of reasonableness will become very important to you in the constitutional realm as well as in the realm of administrative review. Now I'd like to say a few words about the interplay of parliament executive and the courts. And how important three strong and vibrant and independent branches of government are. I say this at a time when in the world, we see concerted attempts by some governments, not ours, fortunately not the government of this country to undermine the independence of the judiciary. We have been watching this since particularly, democracy watch puts it at 2011, some scholars put it earlier, but we've been watching a turning in the mood. After the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust, the millions and millions of murders, the millions upon millions of lives lost in combat, economies in shambles. The world said never again. And the choice instrument to ensure that it never happened again was law, the rule of law. And the dream was that it would be applied internally with strong independent courts to ensure that legislative and executive branches didn't get too out of hand. And that eventually it would indeed immediately started to spread internationally. And we had documents like the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and many, many other covenants to shore up different rights on the international level. All through laws, super laws, yes, but laws. Laws that spoke in legal terms, international conventions and along with the protection of rights and workers rights and prosperity and children and all of those things on which there were conventions. We also had a flourishing and a broadening of international trade conventions. And so we have the rise of the WTO and many other collateral sorts of arrangements. The European Union is another example. And all of this very legalistic, all of this new order, we have an international court of justice to resolve those pesky border disputes that led 19th century nations to fight each other and into war. And we ultimately even got an international criminal court, although the verdict is still out on how powerful that's going to be. But to make the point, put the point simply, the world decided, most of it, a lot of it, to use the law to shore up peace, to shore up prosperity, to use legal instruments and internally to encourage democracy, a democracy in which there was a legislative branch, an executive branch and an independent judiciary. That was the dominant model. Well, we know that was not the case in China for complicated reasons having to do with the resolution and the view that the law was a bourgeois instrument designed to keep elites in power. We know it didn't happen in the communist countries, which are now Russia and those of Eastern Europe where communist regimes were put in place and courts in the independence since never developed. But then the Berlin Wall fell and great rejoicing, Francis Fukuyama, the historian, United States historian, said, end of history, it's over. And over for the good because we finally established it. So we rushed in to the European, new European Eastern European nations and your country, my country, the United States, mature democracies around the world, were invited to come in and help establish courts, help establish independent prosecutorial services, something they kind of lacked in East Germany and Russia, help establish independent judges individually and independent courts institutionally, courts that would be able to stand up to the executive and the legislature if they overstepped the boundaries of what Lord Bingham called that irreducible minimum of protection of fundamental rights. And it seemed to be going well for a while. And then in the last decade, we have seen a reverement. We have seen, and you know this as well as I, but we've seen countries like Hungary and Poland take steps including legislation to reduce the power of the judiciary, to undermine it, to replace judges. The first thing that happens when democracies want to get rid of rights is that they reduce the powers of the courts. They bring them to heal one way or the other. In Russia, it seems to have been more of a passive thing. They just don't enforce the laws. So you go to court, maybe not, you get a victory, you get a judgment, but it doesn't matter because they wouldn't enforce it. So of course, the people quickly realize this constitution is not worth much. My rights are not going to be protected in a legally equal way, which was something Lord Bingham also insisted on equal protection of those fundamental rights for everybody, not just the high and the low. And so we have seen, we've seen problems in Ukraine, I can go on and on, but we have seen a conscious undermining of the legal system and the rule of law. I was at a conference where I was told that in Hungary they have now passed a law which makes it a criminal offense for a lawyer to assist an alien in his or her, case to stay in the country. And the lawyers were asked from Hungary, working for an NGO, well, what are you going to do? Can you disobey the law? And they said, yeah, we will, and we'll hope we won't get imprisoned. Puts a lawyer in a very difficult position because of course, you're sworn to. But these are the things that are happening. And they're not happening only in Eastern Europe. There are many judges, as we speak, imprisoned in Turkey, presumably, because they were not thought reliable or favorable to the government. When you're imprisoning your judges, not much independence. The ones who are left are going to probably be tempted to be favorable to what the regime wants. Venezuela, the Supreme Court was entirely removed. There are a number of states in Asia where Supreme Courts have been removed in the last couple of years. I can't go, can't name them all, but the most worrying thing for us in Canada is that just south of the border, that bastion of the rule of law, leader in the world of post-World War II world of developing these legal structures and that were to support basic rights and improve life for people by using the law, very good conventions. We see a resiling from that. And we see, as I mentioned, the president undermining judges if he doesn't agree with them. We see him attacking his attorney general who is supposed to be prosecuting cases in an independent fashion. And we see a lot of other things and you know them better than I. But it is a very partisan time. Some of you may have watched the Kavanaugh hearings. We see a great many Americans, including those who sit in Congress and the president, who seem to view the role of the Supreme Court now as a political role. It's a shadow of the political parties who support a particular candidate. I believe that many of the judges on that court, including the Chief Justice, continue to be devoted to the role of the court as an independent and impartial arbiter of the law and not simply a political actor. But the ingeniousness of some of these think tanks and right wing theorists is amazing and they will come up with very good legal arguments right now. Academics in the United States are discussing that the idea and many of them believe it apparently, that the president is not under the law. The president is above the law and they base this on the way the Constitution is worded. And there's also discussion in academic circles in the United States about a theory that I think a scholar named Schmidt introduced in Germany in the Weimar Republic. And I'm probably making a pastiche of it because, but the idea is this, there are three branches of government, legislative, executive and judicial. The judicial has got way too strong and has really encroached on the executive power. The president represents the executive and therefore the president, all other members and players in the executive should do what the president wants. That's the general kind of argument that's being developed. Well, so the environmental protection agency the head of that has to do exactly what the president wants. The prosecutor Jeff Sessions has to do exactly what the president wants and you go on and on and on. And if you, I won't comment on that further except to say, just think about the kind of world that governance that would lead to where there are no independent checks from any of these agencies or any of these institutions if that were ever to be accepted. Now the court will stand there and that argument, well, we have to be made if it is made at all. But these are the kinds of things that not to be over dramatic, strike fear into my judicial heart if that's not an oxymoron and make me worry. There has definitely been a mood change, a swing in the world. Some people call it unravelling and we're headed in a different direction than we were in the last half of the 20th century. That may swing around, who knows? I hope it does or it may get worse before something terrible happens and it gets better. But this is the world in which we are living as we move forward. And so people ask, how do we preserve rights in this world? That we are facing now. These dark cold winds that seem to be blowing over the legal world, this shift in view as to how, as to the proper role of courts and the law. I think it matters enormously. This country gave us the seeds of the rule of law. The independence of the judiciary in the rule of law has its roots in the battles of Lord Cook for judicial independence. And it was transplanted throughout the English-speaking world. Until we came to believe, it might ultimately be downed everywhere. But now we are facing a new challenge. This country faces a particular challenge because at a time when rights are being pressured, being undermined all over the world, you are facing a constitutional change. And there will be a vacuum and everything will depend on how the legislature, the executive, and in particular the judges rise to the challenge, how they fill that vacuum. Will they protect that irreversible minimum of fundamental rights that Lord Bingham spoke of? Or will it prove difficult in the face of whatever crisis may come along or whatever negative opinion might be taken up by the populace? I for one believe that England will not resale from its strong protection of human rights and its strong protection of the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law. I think I've talked long enough and I'd be happy to answer your question. Not sure quite how I follow that. I would like to thank you so much for a wonderful thought provoking lecture which has illustrated from the themes of Sir David Williams's work, the importance of the need to protect civil liberties, the need to protect the independence of the judiciary and the importance of maintaining a balance between the three branches. And in particular for combining in some senses explained to us the difficulties that we face going forwards. So as you mentioned, with Brexit comes the removal of one of the few constitutional backstops we did have through the removal of the EU's charter. We'd still have the element of a suggestion from the manifesto in the government. Originally a long time ago, pre-Brexit, well there were mentions of the need to remove the human rights act and to change it and replace it with a British bill of rights. And yet at the same time, I think as you mentioned, we can still point to a very strong independent judiciary with a long standing tradition of protecting civil liberties and human rights. So amidst all the challenges, you've given us a fantastic message of hope to build on going forward. Lots, lots of food for thought. So I'd like to throw it over to the room for questions.