Warren Pyke is, by all accounts, a serious practitioner. Thirty-five years acting for the underprivileged, the vulnerable, the mentally ill, the villainous and a great many “ordinary folk” is real civil-liberties work. His reply in these pages,
“Balance needed in criticisms of Lord Cooke and the Supreme Court,” takes issue with my June essay,
“Lord Cooke's indictment.” Pyke is right that my column did not survey the whole output of the Supreme Court. It did not attempt to. Most of the court’s judgments doubtless are orthodox and well-reasoned, and nothing I wrote was meant to suggest otherwise. On that much, Pyke and I agree. The complaint was never with the body of the court’s work. It was with an increasing number of radical decisions.
