 Yn ni'n gweld mae'r ystafell fish已oddiemni i'w dynnu, mae'r Llywodraeth Unigraju. Mae'r daelol sydd holl i'r ysgoliau sy'n lawer i fewn gwrthee'r Llywodraeth, i fewyd i'w Cymru, i fewn ddeliwyr i fewn ddiad, i fewn ddeliwyr i'w Llywodraeth. Peewyd y gallwn ni wedi'u gweld eich dynnu yn y byddai. Yn ni wedi'u gweld eich dynnu. Felly'r ddeliwyr i fewn ein holl yn y byddai yw mosfur yn y byw yn y bydau, ..familia. Ac y gallwn ffawr i'r eu hunain oedd yn ddechrau Stadff erbyn ymdigeiddiadau... ..y'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r Ffoste Normen yn y ffordd o'r ysgol... ..fos ar gyflawni'r ffawr. Mae yna, yn ymddangos bod yn rhywbeth ystod... ..y'r bwysig yma o'r cyflwyno'n ei wneud am y cwbl... ..y'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r cyflwyno'n ei wneud... ..y'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r Ffoste Normen... if he described the office of the chair of the faculty of law as a baggage handling facility. It is especially appropriate that we are meeting here in Cambridge this week to consider the unity of public law. Let me justify that proposition. One reason is that it is just over 450 years, I'm stretching a point a little bit, just over 450 years since Professor Sir Thomas Smith, who was the university's first professor of civil law, the first professor of law as it were in the modern sense, it is just over 450 years since he completed his life's work, Day Republica Anglorum. As you will know, it is my bedtime reading. It was last night at any rate. This was his famous treatise effectively on the constitutional and administrative law of England in his time. The extraordinary range of that work encompasses what we would now recognise, he of course would not, as constitutional law, administrative law and even if you look really hard the law relating to human rights. It is also a comparative work, a work about the structure of the governance of England based on Sir Thomas's intimate knowledge of civil law. It is in both those senses perhaps an object lesson in unifying public law. Time has not stood still in Cambridge since 1565, despite what some may suppose. World leading figures in public law such as Stanley de Smith, Sir William Wade and Sir David Williams in their time revolutionised the study of public law and did much to establish Cambridge at the forefront of public law scholarship. Of these it is perhaps true that David Williams occupied a rather special place in the affections of those of us in Cambridge and in the wider world. I must refer of course to his path-breaking scholarship on civil liberties, but he was of course much more than a scholar. He was an engaged public intellectual whose influence on government policy, especially in the 1970s, was profound. He was also a gifted teacher and a committed mentor whose influence on students and colleagues, especially younger colleagues, was profound. In the days and weeks following David's death it was very apparent that everybody had their own story telling something of the goodwill and generosity of that great man. David Williams was also a legendary university leader who had a lasting influence on this faculty. He was its chair. On his college he was the president of Wolfson and on the university. In his university role he remarkably spanned two eras in the history of this university. He was the last of the old style vice-chancelors of the university. That's to say those who ascended to office simply because they had lived long enough. But he was also, and this is a credit to his talents, the first of the new style professional vice-chancelors. All of this leads me to the second reason why the timing of this conference is so apt. In order to celebrate David Williams' life and work, we will shortly, on the 15th of October, be naming this building, which is currently unnamed, in his honour. It will become the David Williams building. Moreover, as many of you will already know, we have in recent months established the Sir David Williams professorship in public law. This comes about as a result of the extraordinary generosity of Sir David Lee and the Lee family and other anonymous donors. It is a remarkable thing in the university of today to have a chair fully funded, established in perpetuity and the faculty is grateful for this. And we are pleased that we can honour Sir David's name in this way. The chair was formally established in May of this year and it was a great delight to us all that Christopher Forsythe consented to be the first holder of this chair, albeit for the all too brief period before his retirement at the end of this month. We will move in the course of the coming months to advertise the David Williams chair with a view to filling the post from October 2017. Importantly, we intend that public law, for the purposes of this chair, be public law in the very broadest sense, in the sense that Thomas Smith would have recognised in a comprehensive sense and in an international sense. In other words, we are hopeful that by designating the chair in this way it will reflect the unity of public law. Your programme for the next few days is rich and varied and I think special thanks are due to the organisers for arranging what looks to be glorious weather in the coming days. I know that you will enjoy and profit from what follows. Once again, welcome. My name is John Bell and I'm the director of the Centre for Public Law. It's my great pleasure to preside this dialogue between judges of different jurisdictions. The arrangement will be that Chief Justice French will speak first or Reid will speak second, and then questions and comments from the floor will be invited and we need to talk to the Centre for Public Law. So that will be the arrangement. When I was young, there was a great entertainment programme called the Two Ronnies. This conference is starting with two robots. Chief Justice Robert French has been head of the High Court of Australia since 2008. He had a very distinguished legal career of the viral on the bench and was also, on the stage, very active in politics. He's been known for a number of things, but particularly for promoting the rights of indigenous Australians. As Chief Justice he's being prepared to encourage the modernisation of the administration of justice. In a recent lecture Chief Justice French reminded his audience that lawyers seek to do more than justify rules. Justice has a higher calling. Justice is not in the abstract of many-tongued flames which burns well beyond the boundaries which contain what we call justice according to law. It suggests that the law schools should measure their success not simply by the number of lawyers that end up in top tier firms but the higher purposes that they serve. And this ambition of aiming for higher forms of service for law is something that's animated his career and will no doubt provide us with suitable introduction and inspiration for this conference. Something called Chief Justice French. Thank you very much Professor Bell. Lord Reid you're honest ladies and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure to be here and particularly in a theatre to be named after David Williams who had a very strong connection with Australia and whom I met when he was on holiday in Australia visiting one of the distinguished graduates of this university who was a colleague of mine on the High Courts, Justice Susan Keefel. I'm going to begin by committing an act of mine to address Majesty and changing the title of this address from cross-jurisdictional dialogue to inter-jurisdictional dialogue because dialogue verging on the vaguely cross is something which the United Kingdom and Australia have engaged in over a number of years. Recently some members of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom described the decision of the High Court of Australia as a radical departure from established law. Of course we were not really in a position to complain about that terminology. In 1966 Justice Menzies of the High Court described the decision of the House of Lords in Rooks and Barnard as a radical departure from what has been regarded as established law. And in 1980s Cigarfield Barwick described the decision in DPP and Majewski as a radical departure from those principles of common law evolved over a period of time but particularly elucidated in the last 50 or so years. Actually if you do a Google search of radical departure from existing law you'll find a very respectable list of entries within as well as between jurisdictions. Inter-jurisdictional dialogue encompasses that kind of exchange and the more positive use of decisions and writings from each other's courts and academies and the personal exchanges between judges, academics and practitioners at conferences like this. In assessing such dialogue it is necessary to acknowledge with harsh modesty that there are limits to the effects which it can have on participating jurisdictions. Unity is a mirage, harmonisation is elusive, convergence as a possibility is a matter of degree. The metaphor to which I will refer a little later of a quilt of legalities is appropriate. In the field of commercial law there are economic imperatives which encourage convergence across jurisdictions both common law and civilian. It serves efficiency by the reduction of transaction costs and from a domestic perspective may make convergence jurisdictions more attractive to each other as sources of investment and collaboration. Convergence in public law at some levels may serve similar ends particularly in its application to national regulatory regimes which affect the conduct of business within and between jurisdictions. That kind of convergence can be linked to the emergence of a body of international public law affecting domestic jurisdictions which are parties to trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties. Under a number of those kinds of agreements non-state actors can seek review of state action, legislative, judicial and executive through the mechanism of investor state dispute settlement. So common standards for domestic regulatory regimes affecting trade and commerce within domestic jurisdictions may inform the answers to questions about fair and equitable treatment, non-discrimination and expropriation under investment treaties. All that being said it is necessary to focus on the reality of legal diversity generally and particularly in the area of public law given its intimate connection with domestic constitutional frameworks, statutory regimes and local legal cultures. Australia and the United Kingdom in many respects sharing similar legal cultures and methodologies and the common legal heritage nevertheless differ in important areas of the common law. Differences which are not directly explicable by reference to constitutional arrangements although they sometimes reflect a particular view of the extent to which courts should go in changing the law. In the field of public law they have included a different approach to statutory interpretation mandated by interpretive human rights statutes. The United Kingdom approach favouring a remedial interpretation and the Australian approach reflecting a more constrained view of the judicial function limited to the application of the principle of legality type approach to available constructional choices. There have been differences in the approach to unreasonableness and irrationality in judicial review of administrative decisions. Proportionality reasoning in the way in which it has been used in rights adjudication in the United Kingdom has not loomed large in Australian public law. There is however in Australia a long standing use of a general proportionality formula which has provided a basis for the limited application of a more structured proportionality reasoning in recent times. Australian courts have not accepted that the concept of legitimate expectation can underpin substantive entitlements as distinct from informing the content of procedural fairness. Indeed there are those who would use a noun converted to an adjective currently fashionable in Australian political discourse and call the legitimate expectation in our public law a zombie principle. As I recently remarked in a sequel to the penalties case upon which we radically departed from the United Kingdom and channeling a game of thrones saying, the differences between the United Kingdom and ourselves do not herald the coming of a winter of mutual exceptionalism. Legal exceptionalism and its grim accompaniment, judicial isolation, are frequently deployed by the critic of the Antipodean direction to describe it as pointing away from a jurisprudential vector in the critic's frame of reference. Mutual exceptionalism I find is a useful term because it accommodates multiple frames of reference in which everybody can regard everybody else as held in the wrong direction. That being said, I do not wish to highlight differences unduly. However they do point to the truth that the extent to which inter-jurisdictional dialogue through use of comparative law materials and engagement between judges, academies and practitioners to play a part in the development of common approaches in public law will be constrained. It will be constrained within each jurisdiction by its constitutional arrangements, the presence or absence of the Bill of Rights, the general legal system and the political and legal cultures of the day. That being said, an important benefit of inter-jurisdictional dialogue which I am hesitatingly accept is that legal principles, modes of reasoning and solutions to particular classes of problem applicable in one country may inform the development of principles, modes of reasoning and solutions in another. However, the effectiveness of such dialogue can be limited by factors similar to those which affect the migration or transplantation of laws from one country to another which as we know can be a very complex function of local cultures, histories and the concentrations and distribution of public and private power within the society. Bearing that in mind in relation to the use of comparative law materials it may be prudent and useful to apply a kind of common law methodology to encourage case by case convergence in solutions to particular legal problems. Such solutions may be more portable across jurisdictional boundaries than large principles. Over time there may be a builder in the common law way of an underlying body of common modes of reasoning of general application and even substantive principles. One particular example I'd cite was from 2000 and I think it was 2003 I sat on the Supreme Court of Fiji as a sectional member. There was a panel of sectional members from New Zealand and Australia and I was sitting with Sir Kenneth Keith and John von Dusar who was a judge of the Federal Court of Australia and I was very concerned the basis upon which one could review the exercise of prosecutorial discresions. It came out of a long convoluted series of actions in Fiji to do with a contested chiefly election and one of the parties in this dispute had instituted private criminal complaints against another alleging perjury and swearing of an affidavit in judicial review proceedings. He took over the proceedings and in the exercise of a constitutional power noledd them and the question was to what extent was that decision reviewable. We had very good counsel, Gerard McCoy QC, who took us through cases relating to the reviewability of prosecutorial discresions from a very large number of jurisdictions. New Zealand, the UK, Canada, Northern Ireland, the US, Hong Kong, Samoa, Guyana, Barbados and the European Court of Human Rights. We wrote a judgement, we dismissed the appeal and I expected that it would simply disappear into the recesses of Fijian legal history which had many more dramatic events than a review of DPP's discresions to punctuate it. It was something of a surprise therefore to see the decision, referred to extensively quoted and approved by Lord Bingham in three privy counsel appeals from Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, cited and applied in the High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland in 2008 in the Serious Fraud Office case in the House of Lords in 2008 and in the case of Lord Carl Armour Secretary of State for the Home Department in 2015. Also by the Hong Kong Court of First Instance in 2008 and in New Zealand in 2015 what brought about its portability? Well perhaps it was simply the relatively narrow focus of the problem and its common features across different jurisdictions. There's nothing novel about the use of comparative materials in judicial decision making in Australia in public law or generally. Our courts may and do in interpreting statutes refer to foreign domestic and international judgments which have logical or analogical relevance. In statutes which give effect to international conventions it's of course quite routine as we all do in our jurisdictions for our courts to have regard to the decisions of courts of other jurisdictions in which the conventions are applied the writings of jurists and the opinions of authoritative international organisations. In the public law field the constitutional and legal system of the recipient jurisdiction will affect the extent to which inter-jurisdictional dialogue has a role to play. It's an important point of difference between Australia on the one hand and the United Kingdom and New Zealand on the other that Australia has a written federal constitution allocating enumerated legislative powers to the Commonwealth Parliament and providing for distinct legislative executive and judicial branches of the Commonwealth Government. Much of that was based on the United States Constitution with the importation of responsible government from the United Kingdom. It provides the framework for much Australian public law albeit it is embedded as former Chief Justice Sir Owen Dixon said in the ether of the common law. And because the High Court exercises final appellate jurisdiction under section 73 of the Constitution it is the final determinant of the common law of Australia which informs administrative law and administrative justice at state and federal levels subject to particular and generally similar state and federal statutory regimes for judicial and administrative review. Lord Reid wrote in an article in the law quarterly review in 2008 that foreign law and the decisions of foreign courts can be a source of ideas and experience and where new legal problems arise to which other systems have devised solutions those solutions will enable the identification of options and possibly even an evaluation of their workability and I respectfully agree. The judge of the court considering foreign law materials including foreign judicial decisions can take them or leave them in the same way as he or she might take or leave academic writings. Their selection does raise methodological questions not unlike those which fall for consideration under the theories of transplantation and migration of laws which I mentioned earlier. It requires discriminating selection and the avoidance of a contextual readings. The field of public law perhaps more than other areas of law must be understood in each country in which it is used in its local context. If there be such a thing as public law lying across national boundaries then it probably finds its place within Professor Santos's metaphor as a quote of legalities. Now this was a figure of speech which he applied to legal pluralism in Brazil which was reflected in the intersection of national law and locally generated rules. Professor Thomas Poole who used it to describe the likely outcome of aspirations for the development of a common law of judicial review grounded in human rights spoke of it in an interesting essay published in 2008 entitled Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. In fact it was a collection of essays in honour of Professor Mark Aronson. Australia in that essay by the way is described as the devil and the high court as engaged in a self-referential and arcane game of glass beads. I will not hold that against Professor Poole because as it happens he did say something with which I agree. He drew attention in his essay to the characteristic entanglement of administrative law, constitutional law and local conditions including the structure of politics and public administration and said normative heterogeneity within a shared but relatively loose framework in part produced by trans national dialogues is a more plausible scenario than homogeneity of administrative law principle. If this is the case then we should reject the common law of administrative law thesis at least in its stronger formulation and start thinking instead of the genesis of a court of legalities in which functionally independent common law jurisdictions interact within a partly shared language and normative framework. The point is illustrated sufficiently for present purposes by pointing to some of those differences in common law approaches to things like statutory interpretation proportionality reasoning legitimate expectation which I mentioned as between Australia and the United Kingdom. The differences to which I can refer can be linked in the Australian context to its written constitution the absence of a bill of rights the absence of any national legislation along the line of the Human Rights Act. We have expressed guarantees under our constitution no guarantee of freedom of speech but an implied freedom of political communication which limits legislative power at Commonwealth and State levels. Our structural and textual features in the constitution have been interpreted as supporting separation of powers and beyond that have given rise to implications which protect the position of the state courts which are repositories of federal jurisdiction under the constitution so that state legislatures cannot abolish state courts they cannot subject them to direction by the executive in their judicial decision making. They cannot confer on judges of state courts non-judicial functions which are substantially incompatible with the functions of the court of which the judge is a member and state legislatures cannot immunise decision makers under state law from official review by the Supreme Courts for Jurisdictional Error. The last proposition goes a long way to entrenching for state supreme courts their traditional supervisory function with respect to official decision making in a way that reflects the entrenched judicial review function of the High Court under section 755 of the constitution. So it is that with that kind of constitutional entrenchment we don't hear much talk about common law constitutionalism in Australia at least in the context of what would happen if the legislature were to endeavour to abolish judicial review. It's an interesting question for the United Kingdom and there has of course been discussion here from time to time about that issue. Australia's closest approach to a general notion of proportionality traditionally has been reflected in the term reasonably appropriate and adapted which has been around for a very long time. That's been applied to the exercise of purposive powers including constitutional legislative powers incidental powers which must serve the purpose of the substantive powers to which they are incidental and powers exercised for a purpose authorised by the constitution or a statute which may limit or restrict the implied freedom of political communication or some other guarantee immunity or freedom under the constitution. In the case of the implied freedom of political communication if a law is said to burden that freedom it has to do so for a legitimate purpose the question then is is that law reasonably appropriate and adapted to advance the legitimate purpose in a way that is consistent with the constitutional prescriptions for a represented democracy. We've recently adopted a more structured approach to its application in a case called McCloy which some of you will be familiar with the validity of legislative prohibitions on political donations from property developers in New South Wales and we upheld the validity of that prohibition. The structured approach in the joint judge within that case referred to three considerations drawn from European and in particular German courts criteria which will be familiar I'm sure to many here, suitability necessity and adequacy and balance. But we have treated the approach thus adopted as a mode of analysis applicable to some cases in which the general proportionality criteria in which I mentioned and which has been around for a very long time applies but not necessarily all. Whether proportionality reasoning finds a place as an aspect of judicial review relating to the reasonableness of administrative decisions remains to be seen. Undoubtedly inter-jurisdictional dialogue will feed into any such development. Inter-jurisdictional dialogue is of great value generally and in the field of public law. Its practical effects are constrained by global legal pluralism. I return to the metaphor of a quilt of legalities. This took me I find my most valuable research tool sometimes is Google. This took me to a Google search to an international movement called modern quilting. An international organisation called the modern quilting guild which has about 170 member bodies. With an eerie relevance to our present topic it sets out the objectives of modern quilting which include that it be one functional rather than decorative two interactive rather than repetitious and three embracing simplicity and minimalism and most importantly focusing on finishing quilts on a home sewing machine. Thank you. This is Senator of the Court of Session for the New Year before becoming a member of the Supreme Court and he's also served as an apoculture for European Court of Human Rights. Will we take an active lead on areas such as environmental rights and like Chief Justice French she recognises that judges will be criticised by the public for the decisions that they take but wants commentators to recognise the constraints within which judges have to operate. Will we say distinguished lawyer with a wide international experience and reputation and makes it a very suitable responder. The use of comparative common law material is generally taken for granted on the UK Supreme Court. When we're dealing with a novel or difficult problem in equity or trusts and contract and tort we expect to be referred to the judgements of the highest courts of other common law jurisdictions including in particular Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We consult Australian and Canadian textbooks on these subjects and we expect to be provided with the relevant academic articles from universities there and elsewhere as well as from our own universities. Sometimes we may receive an unwelcome surprise. I can only imagine what Lord Dipplock's reaction would have been if he had read in the fourth edition of Mar Gummo and Lehain that his speech at a time when he held complete sway over his colleagues in the House of Lords in United Scientific Holdings was and I quote, the low water mark of modern English jurisprudence. Lord Dipplock's own approach to academic work whether domestic or foreign was encapsulated in his remark Brandon when the newly appointed Lord Brandon complained that there weren't very many law books in the House of Lords library. Books said Lord Dipplock. You don't need books. All you need is a set of appeal cases and your own intelligence. Those were the days. We are of course conscious of differences between our legal system and those of other common law jurisdictions of differences in the constitutional framework and culture and of differences between our societies. A point sometimes emphasised by Australian judges and academics is that our law has been subject to European influences. But that is nothing new in the common law if one thinks for example of Lord Mansfield's borrowings from civilian systems and in my view it's not a reason why our judgments should not be of interest to common law courts overseas or vice versa. We may at times have been more inclined to flexible reasoning based on perceptions of fairness or what a Cambridge professor recently said of one of our judgments flabby reasoning than in particular Australian judges and we may at times have taken a somewhat less conservative view of the judicial role in developing the law of who I can also think of counter examples but that does not diminish the value of considering the reasoning of other judges working in the same tradition. On the contrary, to give just one example the Australian High Court's refusal to accept the need for a concept of unjust enrichment or the Canadian Supreme Court's rejection of the unjust factor approach followed here that does one example of showing how different approaches followed elsewhere give us all the more reason both to be conscious of our orthodoxies and to question them. But on the other hand there is notably less dialogue between us and most other common law jurisdictions in the field of public law. In public law cases unless we're dealing with international law as we often are for example in cases concerned with refugees or military operations overseas or immigration the only comparative common law material regularly referred to in the Supreme Court comes from Canada. The jurisdiction whose public law judgments have been most influential upon us in recent years apart from Canada is probably Germany. The only common law textbook that I often consult on public law from outside the UK is Peter Hogg's Constitutional Law of Canada but I have on my shelves books on French and German Administrative Law. We have close relationships with the German Federal Constitutional Court and the French Conseil d'Etat as well as with common law courts such as the Canadian and the US Supreme Courts. Why do we make less use of comparative common law material in public law than we do in private law? Part of the explanation I suppose is the point made by Chief Justice French that public law in particular is especially embedded in a particular historical tradition and political context of a specific country and you can see that for example if one looks at case law and federalism of Australia and compares it with the case law in Canada neither of them would provide much assistance to us in the UK in considering our own system of devolution but I think the primary explanation for our making much less use of comparative common law material in public law is that our public law litigation has become increasingly influenced over the past 45 years by European law. When we joined the EEC as it then was English administrative law had only fairly recently awoken from its long sleep. It was applied in a comparatively restrained manner particularly in relation to questions of social or economic policy. By comparison EEC law was a system in which the courts played a role in supervising legislative and administrative institutions and which a more sophisticated system of public law existed derived primarily from French and German administrative law. Our entry into the EEC led to judicial review of legislation. Judicial review of matters of social and economic policy which would previously have been regarded as effectively non-justiciable and the introduction of new concepts of public law such as proportionality equality fundamental rights legal certainty and legitimate expectations. And as the EEC evolved into the EU the ambit of EU law widened so as to cover very extensive areas of public law not only matters relating to trade but also such matters as immigration and citizenship counter-terrorism and the environment. The consequence has been that questions of public law have increasingly become questions of EU law. Because EU law asserts primacy over domestic law and because the EU court of justice asserts its primacy over domestic courts this has given rise to constitutional questions which affect us in common with other member states and in relation to which the German courts began to develop a jurisprudence long before us. That is one reason why their case law is of interest to us. And the public law concepts that I've mentioned not only have origins in Germany and France but continue to be applied and developed by courts there in relation to similar problems to those which face us. That is another reason why we value our discussions with them. The other crucial development in this jurisdiction has been the passing in 1998 of the Human Rights Act. The peculiarity of that act was that it did not establish a domestic Bill of Rights but gave effect in our domestic law to the guarantees which the UK had given in an international treaty authoritatively interpreted by an international court. The reaction of many public lawyers practising before the courts has put shortly been to attempt to turn all questions of public law and indeed many questions of private law into questions of human rights to be decided by applying the case law of the European Court of Human Rights rather than the common law. That explains why the court in the common law world whose judgements are most frequently cited to us in public law cases by some margin is the Canadian Supreme Court. Its charter jurisprudence applies similarly worded guarantees in the context of a broadly similar system of law and government. In theory we might also be referred to judgements from other jurisdictions with comparable charters such as New Zealand and the State of Victoria but in practice their case law has been less abundant than the Canadian case law. And because the ECHR is an international treaty interpreted in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Law of Treaties a host of other international treaties are cited to us as aids to its interpretation turning even more of our public law hearings into discussions of public international law. These two developments the increasing influence and ambit of EU law and the influence of ECHR have had major consequences for our public law as compared with that of many other common law jurisdictions. Perhaps most importantly the approach of UK courts has been influenced to a great extent by the general principles of European law. This has had a profound effect on our thinking. Secondly there has been a development in the nature of the judicial role in public law cases and in how it is perceived. We are required in applying EU law particularly in applying Human Rights Act to make explicitly evaluative judgments. Sometimes relating to legislation on controversial issues which would strike our predecessors as entering more deeply into the merits than the Weddensbury approach as traditionally understood. We have no alternative a legalistic approach cannot supply the answers to the questions which we have to address. We are trying in our case law to develop a structured approach having regard to our constitutional role and our institutional capacities but it is not straight forward. A third consequence is that it has become relatively uncommon for appeals to be brought to the Supreme Court on the basis of English constitutional and administrative law. To the extent that matters are governed by EU law that is inevitable. But to the extent that matters fall within the Ambit of Human Rights Act it's not. We have repeatedly emphasized in recent years that the guarantees in that act are fulfilled by applying our domestic law developed if need be to meet its requirements but many counsel are resistant to that lesson. To give just two examples from the end of last term we heard an appeal in which damages were an allegedly wrongful prosecution argued entirely on the basis of the ECHR without any reference to the tort of malicious prosecution or indeed the law of negligence. And another appeal concerned with the inland revenues disclosure of a tax payers affairs to journalists in which the ECHR was relied on but no reference whatsoever was made to the law of confidentiality. Cases concerned with procedural fairness are almost always argued on the basis of the ECHR while centuries of English law on the subject are disregarded. We continue to produce an appreciable number of judgments in which reasoning is based on English constitutional administrative law but these points are usually raised and developed by the bench without much assistance from counsel searching comparative material. Looking to the future it won't be clear for some time what our future relationship with the EU is to be what changes to our law may result and when they may occur. Equally, although the government has indicated its intention to replace the Human Rights Act with a domestic Bill of Rights the nature of any Bill of Rights its timing and whether the UK will remain a party to the ECHR remain to be seen. I'm not going to speculate about what may happen but the UK's withdrawal from the EU may and I emphasize may have implications for our law's relationship with that of other common law jurisdictions. One important aspect of the EU project is the harmonisation of national laws a process in which a common law doesn't always carry much weight since so few member states have common law systems. Even if we're no longer involved in that project there are interesting questions as to whether the influence of European law on the European concepts on the judicial role and judicial thinking might survive our departure from the EU and indeed the repeal of Human Rights Act if that were to happen. Even outside the EU English common law may continue to be influenced by European law as it has been since medieval times but in that situation the common law would have a more assured future in this jurisdiction and our courts could be expected to take greater account of developments in public law in the rest of the common law world. More generally if the bedrock of a legal system remains for common law then developments in legal thinking in other common law jurisdictions particularly those of which we have important relationships will be much more significant to us than they would be in a world of harmonised EU law. In a wide range of areas as diverse as financial securities and national security there will be practical advantages in the leading common law jurisdictions achieving a degree of coherence in their case law either for economic reasons in a globalised economy or because the countries in question are facing problems which transcend national boundaries and where courts should if they can arrive at solutions which can work harmoniously with those arrived at by the courts of other jurisdictions. Even where it's not important for practical reasons for us to know about the law of other common law jurisdictions the judgments are a valuable source of ideas. We've already discovered the value of finding out how courts in broadly comparable societies such as Canada and the US have applied similar charters to our human rights act but the value of comparative law is wider than that that might suggest. Its principle importance as it seems to me is that the judgments of other common law courts can give us a clearer insight into our own law can make us question received wisdom and can give us ideas about how our law might be developed. How and to what extent should comparative material be used? I'm cautious about using it as a source of empirical evidence as to how a given legal solution is likely to work in practice in this country. That use of foreign law requires a very good understanding of the legal system and the society where it originates. I prefer to use foreign law as a source of ideas of seeing how problems can be approached in different ways in the ways that might first have occurred to us. It isn't critical then whether I've understood the foreign legal system perfectly or not or whether I have a perfect understanding of that particular society. I'm using my own judgement to assess whether the idea, as I understand it, might provide a good basis for considering our law or thinking about how it might develop. Approaching the matter in that way I don't think I need to be particularly anxious about being selective any more than I worry about being selective in looking at domestic precedents or deciding what articles I might read. I think it was Conrad Sheeman who was once asked if X was a bad judge and replied that there are no bad judges there are judges who are good and judges who are very good and X, he said is a good judge. In those terms if I know that judge A is a good judge and judge B is a very good judge then I'm going to read judge B and not judge A, whether they're foreign judges or domestic ones. So in conclusion I'd say but in an increasingly globalised world there are practical advantages in the common law jurisdictions achieving a degree of coherence and consistency. As we've recently said in some of our judgements although it's inevitable that there will be inconsistencies in how the common law develops in different jurisdictions nevertheless it seems to us desirable for those jurisdictions to learn from each other and at least to lean in favour of harmonising the development of the common law around the world. Thank you.