 Professor Cornish this is our third interview for the Eminence Scholars Archive and I hope that today we can discuss your published work concentrating on your books which were published over nearly 45 years during the period 1968 to 2013. They cover an impressive range of topics, the jury system, intellectual property and the development of various legal topics during the 18th to the 20th centuries. So could we start with your first book that was published in 1968, The Jury by Penguin Press and I wonder if you can tell us how you devised and executed this project and what originally motivated you. It arose out of the work that was being planned by a group of teachers at London School of Economics, all of whom were masters of their particular crafts and they had been drawn together by Charles Clarke of Penguin's the legal editor at the time, young man full of inspiration and so books like Body and Diamond on the Consumer Law and Society, Wedderburn on the Worker and the Law and many others followed in this process of trying to establish a socially realistic view of how the law operated as distinct from learning its principles in a relatively abstract way so you've got no feel of the range of society who would get involved in particular parts of the law. The jury suggested it itself to me because I was teaching the English legal system sort of task that junior lecturers get and it seemed particularly enticing because of course it is a secret system. Judges instruct jurors in in our jurisdiction without being present during their discussions and reaching of verdicts and nobody knows much about what happens and I thought I could conduct at least some preliminary inquiries nonetheless in order to make a start on opening up the jury system. Perhaps it was a rather strange thing to do in the jury trial was becoming progressively more focused on serious criminal offences only. It had practically lost all role for instance in accident law even though juries did set the level of damages when liability was found. So I set about various ways of trying to meet people who dealt with juries, judges of course, counsel and I was able to get the names of some who had served as jurors in London and arranged to interview them and very interesting it was. Of course the impression you get from people who have prepared to give you an interview is one that they were deeply involved in it and they certainly were that's why they wanted to talk about it. They weren't people who it had been an awful bother in their lives to have to come to Stoke Newington Court or wherever it was instead of going on with their one-man business very often though some exemptions were available in the system because of that sort of factor. And so out of these various talkings about what either participants themselves as jurors or other people in court came to know from experience about jurors I was able to build up something of a working picture. Some of the critics pointed out I really had no objective across the board knowledge. Thousands of people were serving each year as jurors and how to get a bit closer to a social picture of them was under the rules then and now very difficult. It wasn't actually illegal to interview jurors at that stage so that was introduced into the law in 1980 when more people got interested in talking to them. So the blinds came down in form of a statute. I think I recall one of the reviewers somebody by the name of Cameron who himself has written on this topic saying that it was difficult because like the Chicago work there was not much hard basic information. Do you think this is altered in the years? I don't think it's seriously altered at all. Different issues of course have come up the social constructions construction of juries changes as more and more people are drawn into the system and in 1970 women were admitted for the first time to jury trial extraordinarily last ditch stand and there was a certain amount of concern about whether people of less intelligence working people should be serving on jurors because they might find the subject matter difficult simply to comprehend or their task difficult to comprehend. So these streams were certainly there but you couldn't say they were dominant factors which the great minds of the legal system discussed constantly with a view to change not at all. Judges have many reasons for wanting the juror to stay in securing public acceptance for what went on particularly in criminal law proceedings.