And it would be a shame if the author’s anatomising of the problems turned into a premature autopsy. Oh come on, now: is it really that bad? Well, bits of it certainly are. The justice system is like a patient in A & E, forced to lie on a stretcher because there are not enough trolleys, waiting seven hours for an X-ray to ascertain just how badly broken they are, and likely to pass away before a drip feed of emergency funding can save its life. But, satisfying and even financially rewarding as all that may be, one imagines none of this would please the author more than for the book to have some effect in remedying the ills which it describes.Īnd they are ills. It has received a large number of glowing reviews and a lot of attention in the legal and also the general press. The book has remained in the Sunday Times top ten bestsellers list for nearly six months. The series can be viewed here.Thanks to a well-supported crowdfunding campaign, copies have been provided for all MPs. In 2020, Channel 4 News produced a four-part documentary series, The Secret Barrister: Disordered Justice. Their new book, “Fake Law”, was published by Picador in September 2020, and was immediately a Sunday Times bestseller. It won the Books Are My Bag Non Fiction Award 2018, and was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year and Specsavers Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2018. The Secret Barrister’s first book and Sunday Times No.1 Bestseller, “Stories of The Law and How It’s Broken”, was published by Pan Macmillan in March 2018, and was in the top-ten bestseller list for over a year. The Secret Barrister is a patron of FRU (Free Representation Unit). In 2018, the Secret Barrister was named Legal Personality of The Year at the Law Society Awards.

In 20, the Secret Barrister was named Independent Blogger of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards.

The Secret Barrister has written for the The Times, The Guardian, New Statesman, iNews, Standpoint, Esquire, Counsel Magazine and Solicitors Journal, and is regularly quoted across print and broadcast media, including BBC News, Channel 4 News, The Sun, The Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Huffington Post and the Evening Standard. It also tries to help to demystify and debunk some of the stranger or more controversial legal stories that make it into the news. This blog aims to bridge that gap by providing a candid, and hopefully accessible, explanation of our criminal justice system, of how it works, and of how, all too often, it doesn’t. The law can often feel to the public like an alien and impenetrable world, linked to everyday life only by selective news reportage and artistically-licensed tv dramatisation. The Secret Barrister is a junior barrister specialising in criminal law, and part-time author and blogger.

Author of the secret barrister