Lord Sumption

In his first lecture, recorded at Middle Temple in London in front of an audience, retired Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption argues that, until the 19th century, law only dealt with a very narrow range of human problems. But that has changed radically. He says that the growth of the law, driven by a demand for greater security and less risk, means people have less liberty.

In the third of his lectures, he criticises the “mission creep” of the European Convention on Human Rights and suggests that the UK could be forced to withdraw from the nearly 70-year-old convention.

Lord Sumption says that “intensely political questions” had been reclassified by the ECHR as “questions of law, thus removing them from the realm of democratic decision-making and referring them instead to national and international courts”.

Writing for Scottish Legal News in June, advocate Paul Harvey, of Arnot Manderson Advocates, argued carefully against Lord Sumption’s views on the Strasbourg court.

Watch the Reith Lectures here