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Swindlers (Including The Master of The Rolls?) Not Wanted: Bentham and Justice Reform

Speech by Master of the Rolls: Bentham Lecture 2011

03/03/2011

 

(1) Introduction

1. "Jeremy Bentham had a famously low opinion of judges and lawyers. As he saw it, in order to enrich themselves, lawyers ensured that English civil justice was ‘. . . a system of exquisitely contrived chicanery which maximises delay and denial of justice.[1]”. With a more recent UCL alumnus in mind, one might characterise him as an extreme Woolf reformer avant la letter..."



[1] Bentham cited in Dillon, Bentham’s Influence on the Reforms of the 19th Century, in Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Vol. 1, (1907, 1992 Reprint) (Boston, Little Brown & Company) (1907) Vol. 1 at 496.