 Mae'r leisig i'w ddefnyddio i gael y bydd yma yng Nghymru, dywedodd i'r llwys am hynod. Mae'r llwys am 1, a'r sefydliadau pan'r sefydlu Cyllidau o'r cyfleu'r cyllidau y Llor. Mae'r cyfleu yma, efallai yma yng Nghymru yw'r Llor, mae'r cyfnodd ymlaen i, mae'r cyfnodd o'r mynd. Mae'r cyfnodd ymlaen i, mae'r cyfnodd yn llwybydd, mae'r cyfnodd a'r llwybydd yma yw'r cyfnodd. Felly, sef yr unigai'r gyffredig i'r studiadau, rhai unser ymateb sydd wedi'i gweld y polisi, rhaid i'ch cynnig i gael i'r cyffredig ar y llaw i'r gŵr yn gyllidol. Roedd ymchwil i'r gŵr yn ynnig i'r cyfredig i'r llaw i gŵr ar gyfer y llaw ar gyfer yr unigai, o'r cyffredig i'r llaw i'r gŵr yn cyffredig i'r llaw i'r gŵr i'r gŵr, a oedd yn ddeudio arweinydd diwrnodiau i weld y slipsol lawn arall sy'n gwahanol. Yma, yn fawr mae pob oes y gallwn ddyn nhw ffyrdd i gyd-fellufol yn ddiddorol y drafodaeth o'r llyddau. Felly wrth gwrs a byddwn ni yn mynd i'r gerdd y gallwn sydd wedi gwam hynny o'r unrhyw o'r teimlad ar y law. Felly, yma'r unrhyw i'r unrhyw i'r unrhyw o'r ddyn nhw'n mynd i'r le? Yn ychydig, fyddai'r ffordd o'r ffordd ar gweithio'r gondwyd yma yw ymarfer. A wedi gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gwaith i'r gwirioneddau. Fynd i'r llun yma, Joshua, yn ymddangos i'r swyddiannol, yng nghymru, ac i'r Gweithio'r Gweithio Maddlin, yng nghael yng Nghymru yn ymdannu yma i'r gweithio'r gweithio. Yn gweithio'r gweithio, amser a'r anodd, o'ch ddweud ar gweithio'r gweithio. Felly, efallai eich cyfnodd? Efallai eich cyfnodd? A'r Proseson Trump? Efallai eich cyfnodd? If you wanted the UK to stay in the European Union or if you wanted Hillary Clinton to become president have you come to terms with what happened? Or have you, if I can put it this way, become open minded about the virtue of being open minded and now comes the conclusion that open mindedness is not all that great? So my aim in this lecture is to sketch how reflection on the supposedly open and shut cases in law and wider life might encourage open mindedness. This could lead you to study a masters in law or an introductory module at the open university. Other subjects and universities are available. But it might simply encourage personal endeavours. For instance, I've just limbed up for my 60th birthday by rereading 60 books from our bookshelves at home one a day for two months. So, as everybody has anything to do with the law well knows the path of the law is. Now that's an echo of a famous lecture by Oliver Wendell Holmes probably the most famous American jurist and judge ever who was speaking to Boston University students at the end of the 19th century. He begins by saying the path of the law is not a mystery. And that's where he goes wrong because the law is a mystery, at least to me. And the path is the wrong metaphor and these points are related. A path is usually beaten through the most direct route but the law, like this lecture, tends to meander. Or as I would put it, has twists and turns. As Mark Twain observed, the African American pilots on the Mississippi had to know the shape of the river. Every bend, the depth at every point be alert to the fact that the river is in constant flux. This is why seeking to understand the law is such a challenge and such fun. Of course other disciplines are also full of excitement and nothing in this lecture is meant to take anything away from the work of the Open University's great academics past and present in other disciplines. Many of whose readers and set texts are on my bookshelves. From the giants of yesteryear some of the books which I had to look at in this 60 book workout right up to the latest book by colleagues in the strategic research area on Brexit, the book already out. So there are lots of ways of doing this but in my own case my subject has been law. And when it comes to having fun in law nobody can match the only other professor in an inaugural lecture in law here at the Open University the late and great Gary Slapper who invented and popularized a category of weird cases which did so much to draw students and the public into an appreciation of the law. He had a serious intent both in establishing himself and the Open University in the hearts and minds of lawyers and in educating us all. For example before I joined the Open University and before I joined Twitter my son in the audience here forwarded a tweet from Gary Slapper which is quoting the Attorney General Effie Smith who was in a case where somebody said Professor Holdsworth disagrees with your argument and Smith said but I beat Holdsworth as a student for the Vinerian law prize. So Gary was always looking at different angles on the law. Weird cases is one way of putting it more traditionally law students are told that there are easy cases and hard cases and they're not going to get to look at the easy cases. So in law we tend to focus in universities on the hard cases the ones where reasonable lawyers could reasonably disagree on the interpretation or development or application of the law. I said that some of those cases are so morally concerning that whichever way you decide you probably have got a moral qualm or if you haven't you probably haven't understood the question and so I call those rather than hard I call them uneasy. Uneasy cases and I've talked about uneasy ethics. But tonight I thought I would talk about those supposedly easy cases the simple ones the ones which are apparently strewn across the path of the law. Now when I think of that phrase part from Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert McGarry the other person I think of is G.D. known as Karky Roberts Casey and then QC a robust rugby player a prosecutor at Nuremberg and the recorder of Exeter. When he was writing one of his two memoirs he had in front of him his taught examination paper from his student days in 1909. Again our son Jamie has just set a taught exam taken this morning by students at King's College London. It probably didn't have this kind of question which faced Roberts. Has A, we always like to use an initial what we did in those days has A any and if so what remedy in the following case he is lunching in his room which opens onto his garden he sees a local socialist with a capital S I say that I can actually see a local socialist here. He sees a local socialist walking up and down his gravel walk occasionally stopping outside the window to stare unpleasantly at A's meal and to make a few rude observations. Does A have any remedy? Now would you say that kind of hypothetical exam problem is a weird case a hard case, an easy one, an uneasy one or a case that is open and shut? If you're wondering whether A has a garden gate and if so whether it was open or shut then you might just in a dreaded phrase already be thinking like a lawyer. Now if we prejudge cases as open and shut when they're not that prejudice can cause damage to other individuals to communities, to society and to ourselves. More generally then we can all learn from the law and from the study of other disciplines to be more open to insights to the truth to the facts and this is especially important in this era dubbed as post truth a time of fake news. But being or becoming or remaining open minded is not itself open and shut matter. It requires humility imagination constant attention and commitment to self-improvement. Some people including quite a few academics do not want to be open minded at least not on our core beliefs or our sense of identity or our insistence that one factor can explain everything. Or to put it another way we want to be open minded but we don't think everything is open ended and up for grabs in for instance politics particularly not if we're losing. But my concern is with those people who do genuinely want to be open minded. Not just to say we're open minded but actually to become or remain open. And my argument is we have to think about that and work at it and I'm not claiming to be open minded myself because too many people in the room who know that's not true. But you can be a coach of those who might surpass you in such an endeavour. So as a start and as a lover of metaphor what is it in the open and shut metaphor which is being opened and shut? I mean in one sense it's a mind a legal case but are we comparing it to the opening and shutting of a suitcase an online file a Manila folder kind of file a door, a gate, a window, a book or what? Is it something which can be partially opened or shut? Is it something which can be shut but not necessarily locked? Is it a way through? Or is it a container that can be empty or full? And if McGarry's metaphor is going to work is the thing which is being created as opened and shut is it the kind of thing which can be strewn around a path? Paths or in my preferred imagery rivers are not usually strewn with windows, doors or books although canals do have locks but I'm not sure that McGarry really thought through the metaphor. Still an open mind is definitely not meant to be an empty mind keeping your mind a jar is not about keeping it in a jar pickled in aspic and mind what we mean by mind by the way because we have experts in the room on law and neuroscience who will tell you that the mind is not the same as the brain. So, the case that I was quoting at the beginning you've seen there was reported in 1970 hence the date but it actually happened in 1968 and nobody thought it was worth reporting for a couple of years. So, in 1968 what was happening its context was the Labour Party in Pembroke in Wales the MP for the constituency had just brought out this book called The Gadarine 68 I can see some of you thinking oh a campaign I could join Free the Swine The Gadarine 68 No, it's about 1968 and his subtitle gives you a clue of what kind of a Labour MP he was the crimes, follies and misfortunes of the Wilson Government Yes, that was a Labour MP attacking the Labour leader and the Labour leader's policies My, how times change Not surprisingly a meeting of the constituency party called to deselect him not just for this but for more or less everything the meeting broke up in disorder and his supporters were summarily expelled from the party His book's epigraph is about the Siege of Pembroke in 1648 which might appeal to Welsh students and colleagues Donnelly was a troublemaker he might say, certainly a troubled soul he hopped from one political party to another he did conclude this book with actually a beautiful political personal manifesto but sadly he took his own life a few years later Now, why did this case lead to these comments was on that issue of expelling members of the Labour Party without a hearing and the judges say well, they might have had some kind of explanation gives them a chance So, I want to begin a look at some earlier cases by appealing particularly online to our law students and encouraging them asking the question to law graduates in the olden days who were thrown out of university or thrown into police custody Please do not take this to be condoning bad drunken behaviour idleness, cheating stereotyping students or police but my first few examples are as students getting into trouble and sometimes out of it Please also do not think that the police have not improved The open university led by has been leading research into leadership ethics and other aspects of improving the police service but if we go back to in fact just before I was born back to the 1950s a postgraduate student who already had a first class undergraduate degree in law was found guilty of dangerous driving on the word of two police officers he was fined 40 pounds this was in Oxford the same student then pleaded guilty to attempting to steal a street lamp and was fined 5 pounds the second offence was missed by the media which mattered to the defendant who had political ambitions on appeal in the first case the barrister then had a problem because the barrister wanted to cite the client's clean driving record wanted to challenge the police officers but didn't want to give them the chance to mention the defendant's second offence, his other conviction the strategy then was not to put the defendant on the stand but to produce a witness the fellow passenger and then to question the police officers but that student, wouldn't you know it failed to turn up on time the court was getting annoyed and eventually adjourned when the witness arrived he was looking dishevelled and asked why he was late he said defiantly that he'd been playing rugby for his college at this point the case appears to be open and shut but what happened next the judge, actually a deputy recorder asked which college were you playing for now it wasn't the judge's college but pretty close it was the judge's father's college it was their first cup final so things started to look up and then the court was more open minded more well disposed of the idea that the police might just be lying the barrister then asked the two police officers the same question without the other one being present in court to hear the answer and then you see why I think that this case is useful for the open and shut analogy was the window of the van the defendant was driving and through which the defendant is said by you to have made an obscene gesture was that window fully down or was it three quarters down one said fully one said three quarters and since the barrister knew from the defendant that neither could be true since the window of the van didn't open or shut like that but had one fixed panel it was a really rubbishy old van and one window panel which moved sideways it was game set and matched to the defendant and well done that barrister and well done that witness for the defence if I tell you that the defendant went on to be elected prime minister repeatedly you're thinking the student must have been Harold Wilson or Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair although only the last of those studied law as an undergraduate but actually it was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Bob which is why I called him Robert Bob Hawke who was elected prime minister of Australia in 1983, 84, 87 and 1990 he didn't only challenge the police as a student even more robustly he challenged his thesis supervisor he actually accused him of something worse than plagiarism trying to stop the student from choosing a research topic which would embarrass the supervisor's role in the politics and economics of a public policy back in Australia but anyway this case of the window that was neither open nor shut serves as my first example both for its intrinsic lessons and to capture the feeling of the 1950s if we go back another 60 years were then in 1897 the Prince of Wales I gather all families in the news in 1897 the Prince of Wales was visiting Oxford and was met by a demonstration the Metropolitan Police on horseback supplemented the local constabulary made lots of arrests including someone I'll call Mr Smith a young don who had recently graduated with the Vinerian scholarship for the best papers in the BCL which we would call the LLM other postgraduate law degrees and prizes are available Gary Slapper tweeted about Smith's prize and the runner-up Holdsworth while I've written about both of those and Holdsworth the person mentioned in that Gary Slapper tweet was a kind of cheerleader and tutor for Kharky Roberts the one who had the exam with a question about the socialist on the path anyway the police arrested Smith put him in a cell overnight and charged him with assorting a police officer and obstructing the police in the discharge of their duty great law professors came to his aid Dicey wrote to him offering him £5 towards a barrister for his defence and sat in the front row of the magistrates court alongside two other great academic lawyers Anson and Markby but Smith defended himself without pocketing the £5 I think when he challenged the police officer's evidence that Smith had hit the police officer the prosecuting council was appalled and said what do you mean by accusing this officer of willful and corrupt perjury Smith said and he used his hand and flourished said that's only one of five possibilities it could be the police officer is guilty of willful and corrupt perjury but it could be that I am this is a good clue from a great advocate as to how to handle these cases or it could be that he's mistaken and he thought that it's an honest mistake or it could be that I'm mistaken honestly or it could be fifthly that actually we're both right that somehow our statements are reconcilable and these are basically the different ways in which the supposedly open and shut cases consistently turn out to be more open than we thought so what happened to that character Effie Smith so again I called him Smith because he was Smith he became ultimately the Earl of Birkenhead, Lord Birkenhead he was Solicitor General, Attorney General and Lord Chancellor I'm going to talk about another Lord Chancellor you see how they used to dress in those days Gerald Gardner in due course but not every student who gets into trouble goes on to become Prime Minister or Lord Chancellor so Edward later Lord Grey was suspended by my old college in the 19th century and I quote idleness but he went on to become our longest serving foreign secretary and Chancellor of his university before our college would accept him back though he had to produce a plan his cunning plan was to switch subjects from greats or classics to law because it would be easier this worked a treat and he graduated with fourth class honours talking of fourth class honours in law Gerald Gardner the open university second chancellor who had previously served as Lord Chancellor in the Labour government which created the open university and also had the distinction of graduating with fourth class honours in law just after the first world war he then went one stage further by achieving the rare feat for a post graduate of being expelled from the university to this I shall return at the end of the lecture now it's not only students who get into trouble in universities by and large academics are treated more leniently by universities when accused of plagiarism authors are but this happens through life as well politicians are accused quite rightly of plagiarism authors are sometimes accused of plagiarism and often what seems to be an open and shut case is actually a bit more complicated you can now look online at my old university Yale and Harvard they have very detailed codes of what is cheating what is collusion, what's collaboration and so on but the same kind of thing happens amongst students, amongst politicians and amongst academics the people are working together sometimes they've got research assistants somebody takes a note of something they drop the quotation marks somebody's in a rush, they hand it on and then they get into trouble so one of the issues for us is how to make judgements and when to know to pause, to consider the arguments the kinds of points that McGarry was making now one of the great features of this university is its embeddedness in each part of the UK in Wales, in Northern Ireland Scotland as well as in England I wrote recently about Lord Denning retrieving his lost or ignored lecture which spelled out that the greatest judges in the history of England have all been Scottish the archetypal Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Lord Mansfield was Scottish so was Lord Campbell so was Lord Blackburn and so on and it's not new for newspapers to attack judges these people were all derided on appointment, essentially for being Scottish but the open flow of ideas and people across that border and other legal system boundaries is refreshing and again I've written about this about the way in which, for instance in a case in which the Labour Government in the 1970s was denying the rights of Indian and Bangladeshi women to become citizens and to live in the UK the two council who argued successfully for the women against what was meant to be a great liberal home office they were both themselves refugees and the biggest excluded group in legal history have been women Eve was framed is the title of a book by Helena Kennedy and even now that women have become judges in most jurisdictions the law can still go backwards but the study and other female judges in Iran were dismissed as a legal system reverted to a men only judiciary but a century earlier Cornelia Sarabji has been described as India's and the United Kingdom's first woman barrister and as Oxford's first female law student it can be quibbles about who's the first because in fact she wasn't allowed to qualify as a barrister for decades but essentially she was a pioneer in the law and she ultimately became the legal assistant sometimes called the lady assistant to the court of wards in India but her first case is the one I want to mention it was very different it was what our open justice initiative would call pro bono so she studied here she returned to India in 1894 and she wasn't allowed to qualify as a barrister but she saw that she could represent somebody a person could represent another person whether or not they were a barrister in certain cases so she was asked to help a woman who was accused of murdering her husband witnesses were openly being bride by the prosecution they got a certain amount for coming to court she saw this happening and they would get more if her client was found guilty so the case seemed pretty much open and shut you don't need to know any more than that but she realised that there was something even more elemental than the lure of money in a disadvantaged rural community namely the weather she convinced the all male jury that in the monsoon it would not have been possible for the body to be left to be discovered in pools of blood in the location in which it was found on a steep slope the blood and the body would have been washed down the hill it was much more likely that the murderer was the chief witness against the accused a man in debt to the murder victim who then planted the body and blamed the victim's wife so she succeeded in convincing a bribed jury that her client was not guilty by now you'll get my drift about meandering or digressing so I want to turn to the most obvious cases of miscarriage of justice because I worked in Northern Ireland I could have used any number of ones related to the conflict there the Birmingham 6th, the Guildford 4th and so on but in fact I'll take a case from the 1980s from just before I went to Northern Ireland where Winston Silcott was found guilty of the murder of PC Blakelock in the Broadwater Farm or Tottenham Riots he was acquitted of an earlier murder but it emerged that when he was convicted of this that he'd been on bail on a murder charge that was another one so MPs called for the judge who'd led him out on bail to resign the BBC interview you can see there on breakfast time 1987 was Frank Boff the picture is there of PC Blakelock and we'll see if we can play what happens next Frank Boff MPs are calling for the resignation of a high court judge following the conviction of PC Blakelock's murderers at the Old Bailey yesterday at the finish of the trial it was revealed that one of the murderers was actually on bail for another murder when he took part in the killing PC Blakelock died during the Broadwater Farm Riots of October 1985 and despite the other issues raised by the trial this morning it's the role of the judiciary which is being spotlighted Conservative MPs Peter Bruynevells are calling for the resignation of the judge who allowed PC Blakelock's murder to be freed on bail Winston Silcott smiled yesterday when it was recommended that he should serve a minimum of 30 years for the murder of PC Blakelock it was the third time he faced a charge of murder at the Old Bailey in October 1980 he was acquitted after a retrial of killing a 19 year old at a blues and drugs party and in February 1986 he was convicted of knifing to death the professional boxer at a party in Hackney it was while Silcott was out on bail on this charge that he led the horrific attack which killed PC Blakelock today some MPs are demanding the resignation of the appeal court judge Robert Limbury who overturned a magistrates decision and granted Silcott bail leaving him free to kill again but last night Judge Limbury said I did nothing wrong he was right according to the law we are joined by Simon Lee a lecturer in law at King's College London good morning to you when the application for the bail was made to the judge what points would be put to him the starting point is to remember that MPs legislated in 1976 in the bail act that the accused has a right to bail unless the judge can be convinced of one of three things firstly is the man likely to run away secondly is he likely to commit another offence while on bail thirdly is he likely to intimidate witnesses otherwise the man has a right that's the starting point now there are people in the room who know that I knew nothing about the bail act 1976 until seconds before that but I wrote about it in the law quarterly review and generally ran the line that well he could still appeal and also that the judge had only done what Parliament had instructed the judge to do when I then moved very soon after that to Northern Ireland and talked about these miscarriage of justice cases I like to think that that encouraged or at least didn't put off one of my law students at Queen's Tony Murphy who went on to become the solicitor on this side of the Irish C who managed to secure the overturning of Winston Silcott's conviction so you know what happens then is the police, the media say or imply that there's no smoke without fire now that somebody got off on a technicality well what was the technicality here there was no video at the evidence that Silcott was ever there during the riots there was no confession other than one thing I come to the one confession you could say had happened was that certain youngsters said he was the leader of the gang and he said allegedly that won't stand up in court they won't stick to that when it comes to court which is taken as if he was intimidating but it was the invention of Esda testing and the vigilance of the solicitor which showed that even that had been put in by the police and so Winston Silcott wasn't guilty and the very authoritative tones of Jeremy Paxman were giving us what you could describe as fake news although it would be harsh in that it was the news as they understood it at the time so I think we need to use our imagination more in the law and in life and I've noticed that while everybody seems to be certain that O.J. Simpson really did it or so and so is guilty in cases that we barely understand which are factual in fiction broad church we think well it could have been any of those men plot spoiler alert it turns out it's not just one of them and we've become a custom line of duty whatever it might be to think that in fiction these open and shut cases are in fact more complex than they first seem one of the things that I did with students at Queens in the late 1980s and early 1990s was to take the one book they'd all read for GCSE to kill a mockingbird Harper Lee's great novel which involves Atticus Finch defending a black man accused of raping a white woman and asked them to write a mini-sequel and there are various reasons for doing that one is that judges are so to speak writing a chapter in a book written by others a kind of chain novel they're not free in the way in which we sometimes criticize them another reason for getting students in Northern Ireland to do this was because Harper Lee says Atticus Finch says you should get inside somebody else's skin walk in their shoes, see the world from their porch which I thought would be important in Northern Ireland and I wanted to encourage imagination so eventually the students said well you write a sequel then so I wrote one published it in a book of materials in 1994 so you can check it out and when you get a version of this lecture to take away it'll have my sequel in there and we didn't know that Harper Lee had herself written a sequel until two years ago when Ghost Seter Watchman came out so in fact he was a kind of prequel that was the original manuscript and an editor had produced from it or encouraged Harper Lee to produce from it to kill a mockingbird and so there must be lots of students all over Northern Ireland thinking that was really ridiculous to do that exercise but then when Ghost Seter Watchman comes out they think oh well let's have a look at what I said what he said, me what she said my version turns out to be a bit more schmaltzy than her version in my version scout the little girl who's the narrator Jean-Louise becomes Dean of a Law School kind of Paul Catley figure and then the first female Supreme Court Justice I thought it was kind of romantic and just and so well I don't want to spoil Ghost Seter Watchman but she doesn't in Ghost Seter Watchman and more to the point reviewers said that Atticus Finch, the hero her father had become a racist and people had named children and dogs Atticus because he was a hero Barack Obama said he was a hero but actually if you read the second novel as I have done it's not the case that he's necessarily a racist but it's more complex and I think she had in mind not only her own father who was a heroic lawyer in her eyes but also the father of one of her classmates at the University of Alabama Law School a guy called Hugo Black the father was the most liberal Supreme Court Justice of the 20th century but he had been a senator and a member of the Ku Klux Klan himself and his youth and I think one of the messages is how it can be more complex and people's views can evolve and that's not the only way in which we try to use fiction in Northern Ireland to encourage students for instance the equivalent of this event my inaugural lecture I gave a play I wrote a play and acted with students in a play called Day of Judgment in one scene for instance it's like the first day at law school the students get to act to be the defendants or the prosecutor's council to open and shut cases for instance, Antigone Socrates Jesus Christ and Shylock one of the students one who defended Socrates has become a judge he's on a Malcolm Sharp so he was an English person studying in Belfast he's now a judge in Swansea and a couple of years ago he hit the press as the judge in a case think what you would do in this case if a woman wanted to call her twin boy and girl preacher and cyanide would you allow that I was rather hoping he was going to say in his judgment that he defended Shylock and if the name had been Hemlock it would have been a bit more touch and go there are all sorts of ways in which we can keep our minds open at Osterley Park National Trust on Bank Holiday Monday our tour guide told us that one of the earlier owners, Nicholas Braeborn had his middle name with lots of hyphens in this his middle name was if Christ had not died for thee thou has been damned that name was allowed in the Puritan's time and you say yeah but that was only his middle name well his father's first name was unless Jesus Christ had died for thee thou has been damned although he's better known by a nickname Praise God so in case you're wondering was there anything in Northern Ireland which any fiction published there was as we were leaving I wrote a political satire called Remote Control which imagines that the troubles in Northern Ireland were brought about in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis as a constitutional laboratory for disastrous policies and reactions to them in my little novella the USA and the USSR take five years to set up the experiment run it for 25 years and take five years to wind it down that's why we had internment modifications of the right to silence shoot to kill, random bombings broadcasting restrictions, a pre-Trump war and so on way ahead of London 2012 I imagined the winding up to have happened through a Belfast Olympic Games I see now that my winding up period was too short but in life after the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election last year including allegations of Russian influence in the latter I'm beginning to wonder whether the experiment is still carrying on I'm beginning to wonder whether the experiment is still carrying on but in a different location in my remote control the American command room was an open secret in that rather like blechities around the corner from the open university the control room was underneath NASA in Houston incidentally we are looking at space governance in our research here but what I didn't include in my satire was how even the enemies of the state might end up respecting the open mindedness of the judiciary I admired the courage and integrity of a judge Mr Justice Higgins I wrote his obituary in the Guardian what I didn't know was the feelings of an IRA man Eamon Collins who had been acquitted on murder charges by Mr Justice Higgins and later wrote a book about it what he says here is that when he was being tried for 5 murders and 45 other serious offences and the judge acting as judge and jury acquitted him and Eamon Collins said the man in the book with the man in the Balaclava on the front cover he realized suddenly there could be such a thing as the impartial application of the rule of law the contrast with our system of justice was extreme what he was saying was the prosecution had failed to exclude the reasonable possibility that I had been treated in such a way as to constitute human or degrading treatment so even though he suspected I was guilty as hell he was willing to let me walk free I could feel nothing but admiration for this judge who on such a fragile legal abstraction had set free a man from an organization which even during the trial had tried to murder him by firing a rocket at his home and so there are cases which appear to be open and shut where the judge decides that they're not and it can be a transforming moment in society or for that individual there aren't only miscarriages of justice there are cases where the carriage really takes us along a path or a journey in the right direction so there are many other things which you can take away in the printed version of this lecture and there are many cases every day in the news where we rushed to judgement was Bob Woolmer murdered was there a murder of a judge in America the first Muslim woman on the New York Court of Appeal who died in the Hudson River sadly a couple of weeks ago and the question to ask really is for me are we more open in universities in the media or perhaps even in courts there's Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale likely to be the next president of our Supreme Court actually judges don't always get it wrong and are we open to surprises in other walks of life for instance in sport you can see what happened here in the 2002 Salt Lake City speed skating four people fell over on the last bend so this guy won was it a fix? well actually the pair skating was fixed and the French judge was suspended for colluding with the Russians to mark down the Canadians in a quid pro quo but in this case I won't play it now but the inexplicable explained is that this guy had done the same thing in the semifinal he worked hard, he understood that he didn't have any more the strength to win, he'd been severely injured but he had a plan a cunning plan so there are great cases in everyday life where we rush to judgement but it turns out that you can explain the inexplicable although it's quite difficult to explain this case where two neighbours in Formby go to court at vast expense to decide whether or not to open or shut their gates and the judge in a solomonic kind of a way decided that well they could be shut from 11 o'clock at night to 7.30 in the morning or he said perhaps you could club together and buy a remote control the title of my book now again as you take away my version of this I want to come towards the issues that face us I was writing about the issues of free speech in our multi-face society a long time ago and they're still there today for us and you can look at various cases where we seem to be caught outside the gates of the law or the door of the law we say that's Kafkaesque we're not sure what we're accused of this issue of is there smoke without fire there is by the way if you have dry ice and it's often a smoke screen isn't it literally on strictly or something like that we're trying to cover up somebody's footwork so if dodgy people are accusing you of something it may well be a smoke screen now what is the secret of being open minded close to home here in Bletchley Park we know that Alan Turing helped save the free world in code breaking and we know sadly that the legal system turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare for him he was prosecuted for homosexual practice and eventually seems to have taken his own life so as we look at all these kinds of sagas how do we keep ourselves open minded this is that Lord Gardner the guy who got a fourth and then got thrown out of university this is him at the open university he became our second chancellor why was he thrown out of university what happened was that a woman wrote a pamphlet about how restrictive the women's colleges were in Oxford at the time and he published it as he thought it was an argument which needed to be heard she'd already left the university the vice chancellor a guy called Farnel called him in and dismissed him for that exercise of free speech so that was why he didn't complete his postgraduate degree but he went on to be the greatest radical Lord Chancellor of the 20th century he'd already argued for abolition of the death penalty he defended the publication of Lady Chathley's Lover one of the witnesses for his defence was Dyllis Pow that woman who had criticised women's colleges it turned out that she was right and he was right and his university was wrong and that's a tip for students generally by the way I mean to digress again John Maynard Keynes when he didn't come first in an exam a civil service exam said the examiner has clearly known nothing about economics certainly in this case it seemed as if Farnel who was illiberal in lots of cases seemed to know very little about the principles which we would hold dear so I wanted before we come to a kind of open forum in which you get to speak and make points and ask questions I wanted to play a little extract which you can find on the open university digital archive of Lord Gardner explaining how he was going to set about being Chancellor of this university and why he was proud to do so it looks a bit 1970s doesn't it the open forum logo there but I am grateful to the open university for keeping its own record and for all the help I've had from the open university and the BBC who provided I didn't keep the Frank Boff Jeremy Paxman interviews the BBC through the open university kindly provided a copy of it if we had more time I would have rolled forward and you could have seen what Jeremy Paxman looked like but this is for me anyway very moving because Lord Gardner is one of those people who have already heard who was treated badly by his university and he had courage throughout a very long career and it's probably the most radical liberal lawyer in the United Kingdom in that 20th century in creating the law commissions he paved the way for massive reform of our law but whenever I'm in a seminar where the law is being attacked as I was yesterday at the launch of Justice Borders and Rights one of our research streams people say quite understandably why are we using an 1861 statute to stop a guy coming through the channel tunnel who's a refugee from Darfur and one of the answers is well you're only going to update the law if you have a parliament that's willing to do that and people, experts who are going to work on the detailed implementation we've got a lot of that to come with Brexit but the law commissions were created by Lord Gardner in the Wilson government he also led the law laws in their practice statement that they would sometimes overturn their own precedence and yet when he came so he was Lord Chancellor in 1964 to 1970 and then Labour lost I'm not surprising they lost given Desmond Donnelly and their supporters thinking that they were awful and when the first Chancellor Lord Crowther sadly died Lord Gardner became Chancellor here so let's see if we can play what he says about how he's going to approach the job I would hope to take rather more part in the life of the university than most chancellors do I'm already attending a monthly to know with the knobs to hear everything that's going on but I feel that I have a lot to learn I don't really understand it yet it's a very involved institution as is I think inevitable because it's unique in the world and I have a great deal to learn and I'm doubtful whether I shall really understand it if I don't take a course even informally as a student because I suspect that this is the only way in which in the end I'll really understand what it's like from the point of view of the ordinary student The Chancellor Lord Gardner speaks about his new role after his first official function towards the end of last year This guy who was as open minded as you can get realised he had to work at it in his 70s and he decided to take a social studies degree here at the Open University while being Chancellor he had to do some other things here he is walking into a lecture theatre this is for the inauguration not of a professor but of a mace which he obviously felt a bit embarrassed about so I'll spare you what's going on here they're wearing gowns but they're trying to play it cool but then he in a minute will say why he accepted the role of being Chancellor of the Open University As this is the first time I've appeared public since my election as Chancellor I should be grateful if you would allow me to begin by saying what an honour I feel it to be to have been elected your Chancellor Indeed I would sooner be Chancellor of this university than of any university including my own and that is because I have always been an enthusiastic supporter of the concept of the Open University and while I shall probably render myself liable to prosecution under the Official Secrets Act I don't mind saying that I remember a day in cabinet when I told my colleagues that I thought that if the government of which I was a member was remembered for anything in the years to come they would be remembered as the founders of the Open University some of them seem to think they're rather odd they're what else they thought we should be remembered for I didn't discover So I hope you agree that that's a suitable moment on a local election day in which to leave Lord Gardner but that's also I hope a very proud moment for the Open University that of all the good things that the Labour government did 1964 to 1970 including the law commissions and so on that he felt that the creation of the Open University was the greatest and in that Open Forum you go on to hear a bit of laughter a few questions comments from the floor which is what we're going to go to now and I would like to think that those of us who are teaching law and researching in law that our greatest achievement will be how our students take forward challenging miscarriages of justice how they go on to be not just judges but working pro bono advising people who are being treated unjustly by their legal system but if they remember us for anything it is for encouraging them to remember that apparently open and shut cases sometimes and not thank you very much