Lord Neuberger discusses privacy and freedom of expression.
"We, or most of us, like to think that we live in an open society. Which is a society committed to liberal, democratic principles and the rule of law. An open society has a number of essential features: political institutions accountable through free and fair elections, an independent and impartial judiciary upholding the law, and a free press. Free and fair elections are, it is true, sometimes superficial, spin-obsessed and trivialising: democracy, according to Winston Churchill, is the worst form of government apart from all the rest. An independent judiciary can sometimes seem remote and pompous, but without an independent judiciary, the main ingredient of the rule of law, we are all serfs. And a free press is often not merely truth-seeking and challenging, but strident, biased and shallow; again, however, without a free press we are damned to servitude."
