Lord Sumption and the Limits of the Law

Nobody could accuse Lord Sumption of ducking the big issues. They certainly don’t get much bigger than those he addressed in the 27th Sultan Azlan Shah Lecture, given in Kuala Lumpur, on 20 November 2013. His paper, entitled “The Limits of Law”, sought nothing less than a redefinition of the boundary between the legal and the political.

Given the fondness Lord Sumption has demonstrated for ambitious overarching historical narrative, with his ever-expanding history of the Hundred Years War, perhaps this should not come as a surprise.  Public law academics responded to the issues raised in Lord Sumption’s lecture at a conference held in Oxford in October 2014. The various contributions to the debate, together with a response from Lord Sumption, have now been collected in a new book, entitled Lord Sumption and the Limits of the Law.

[To read the rest of this review, see the journal Judicial Review (2016) 3, 245-251, available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10854681.2016.1236589]