Legal Academics: Forgotten players or interlopers? Inner Temple Reader's Lecture Series

" The overarching title of this year’s lecture series is "Academics and practitioners, friends or foes". Some of my best friends are legal practitioners. I, on the other hand, only had very small walk-on, and often non-speaking, parts in legal practice. But I was a legal academic for 31 years, and have been a judge for nine and a half years. So, all those months ago when Master Reader asked me to give one of his lectures, the relationship between legal academics and judges seemed a good topic. "