Lord Mayor's Dinner for Her Majesty's Judges, 2013

"My Lord Mayor, it is exactly 50 years since I was called to the Bar and in October it will be 25 years since I was appointed a High Court Judge.

"These years have taught me that we have the priceless advantage of living in a country which respects the rule of law, and I believe equally respects its concomitant, the independence of the Judiciary. I suspect that none of us can articulate it in quite the same way as John Locke, 'where law ends, tyranny begins', but, as a community, deep down in our history and traditions indeed right down to our very roots as a nation, we have an instinctive, intuitive feel that respect for the rule of law has served us well. It has not made, and it could never have made, a perfect society. But without it our society would be catastrophically worse."