Papal plotting, pompous silks and police drama

Demand quiet to read The Infiltrator by Robert Mazur because following the infiltration of the Colombian Medellín cartel’s money-laundering network requires similar concentration to that displayed by the US federal agent Mazur’s undercover persona Bob Musella. He walks you through the international bankers operating in plain sight as you and they become sucked into one of criminal history’s biggest stings. Just remember to stop holding your breath.

Finally, The Sellout by Paul Beatty is a biting provocative satire that sinks its laughing fangs into racism in America. The opening pages sketch the narrator facing the Supreme Court after he has acted to reinstate slavery and segregate his local high school. Whipcrackingly smart, this book should be read only if you want to start the new year laughing maniacally.
Kirsty Brimelow, QC, is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers

Richard Susskind
Warm your feet by the fire this Xmas, with a peaty malt in one paw and a copy of Conclave in the other. This is Robert Harris’s 11th thriller and it is a stonker. More than 100 cardinals have assembled in the Vatican to elect a new Pope. One is an unknown quantity, elected in pectore (privately by the Pope) but emerging as a contender, while the favourites are mired in scurrilous allegations and Machiavellian power-plays. Finishing this splendid and intelligent story, as with all great fiction, brings an acute sense of loss.

Turn next to The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. Skip the first chapter entirely. It is unfathomable that it survived the editorial sword. Plunge instead into chapter two, where begins a fascinating account of the collaboration and friendship of two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. This is the story of their seminal research into the way that human beings make decisions when faced with risks. Although Lewis struggles a little to convey the richness of prospect theory (a Nobel prize-winning contribution to behavioural economics), his account of the human partnership — the motivations, the tensions, and the exhilaration of top flight, co-operative intellectual endeavour — is wholly inspiring.

If winning arguments is your day job (or perhaps just a way of life), a recent selection from the works of Cicero is mandatory reading. Edited and translated by James May, How to Win an Argument is a handsome little tome. Learn directly from the master of rhetoric, how “to prove and to delight and to sway”. Learn also about delivery, memory, and style. This is neither a bluffer’s nor a dummy’s guide to Cicero. Rather, on the subject of persuasion, this is the best of Cicero, gathered affectionately from his great corpus of writings, speeches, and letters. And for the classical Latinist or Roman lawyer, there are ample opportunities here to read the man in the original.

Last is a book for lawyers who want nothing less than to earn more, get closer to their clients, attract the best recruits, and trounce the competition. Smart Collaboration by Harvard’s Heidi Gardner is a rare blend of empirical research, management theory, and concrete guidance. One central thesis is simple, and backed by mountains of evidence — professionals who transcend and collaborate across practice areas enjoy greater commercial success than firms whose specialists operate in traditional silos. This is a compelling call for the reorganisation of legal businesses.
Richard Susskind is co-author (with Daniel Susskind) of The Future of the Professions (OUP, 2015)

Felicity Gerry, QC
Blackmail by Michael Stokes is an unputdownable romp through the intricacies of an armed robbery investigation. The tale is of a financial heist that creates a circumstantial evidence case against a man who has evaded capture for years. Things escalate because the wife and child of a judge who is due to give a crucial ruling are kidnapped to ensure he rules in the defendant’s favour. Michael Stokes’s debut novel after his retirement as resident judge at Nottingham Crown Court is led by Inspector Hood, the Dickens-reading son of a West Indian bus driver who is always one step ahead of the crooks and the barristers.

Packed with characters from pompous silks to plodding police officers, it was a joy to read, not least because I recognised some thinly disguised references to real people including Upstairs Margaret, who did Stokes’s typing in the Leicester chambers he started out in as a junior barrister. Heads are turned by pretty and devious women and stereotypes abound.

This is clearly a world Stokes loves and he tries to show the criminal justice system at its best, although the CPS comes in for some disdain. True to form, Stokes injects humour into the most serious of offending. As far as I can tell his police officers are named after judges and the crooks after politicians. Bumping off the dastardly Grayling will come as a particular delight to many. Dedicated to a police dog, the novel is witty and sharp. Complicated issues of law are explained in simple terms to the reader just as Stokes has done to juries in court for many years. He even gets to grips with the law on joint enterprise, noting its wide reach, but ignoring the parasitic law of the time in which it is set and ensuring that no one goes down for what they don’t know. The final twist that explains why the robbers used salt instead of bullets and the outstanding trial of the femme fatale is enough of a cliffhanger to leave the reader gagging for the next novel. I’m sure these are characters we will grow to love. I warn your family: if this is in your stocking on Christmas morning, you will not surface until it’s done.

The Pepynridge trio of novels by Peter Morrell are somewhat different. Also the work of a retired judge, they explore concepts of forgiveness in the most concerning of topics from paedophilia to false complaints to terrorism and grooming. Set in a fictional village in Northamptonshire, Morrell tackles these topics and a mixed-race gay marriage against a background of middle England country life. Judge Morrell is a legend in our house for his directions to the jury, “This is my court voice, not the voice I use to my wife”, and (when a juror needed to pee), “go when you can, not when you must”. His forthright approach to the law stands starkly to his deeper analysis of the moral issues that so vex our society. This is no doubt explained by the fact that he is now an ordained priest. In each novel — the Rector, the Islamist and the Honourable Member — his style develops into a sort of legal rural Mary Wesley. Tougher going than Stokes’s novel to read, but deeper questions for us to think about. Nothing less would do from either of them and the lags, coppers and lawyers of the Midlands and Peterborough will be glad they’ve both retired.
Felicity Gerry, QC, is a barrister at Carmelite Chambers

Supremely Partisan deals with the partisanship of the US Supreme Court

CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS

Alex Wade
If you believe the right-wing press, some of our Supreme Court judges are “enemies of the people”. Nonsense, says the legal profession; the judges are only applying the law. But to what extent might personal and political prejudice influence judicial decision-making?

James D Zirin analyses this vexed question in Supremely Partisan. The book’s subject is the United States Supreme Court, one which, unlike its UK counterpart, operates in accordance with a written and hallowed, constitution. But Zirin, a well-known litigator and legal commentator, ably shows in this accessible and provocative book that “there is more to judging than a detached analysis of facts, text, precedent, and historical setting”. Supreme Court judges regularly make decisions on partisan lines; the court is “powerful” and “political”, according to Zirin. As befits a lawyer, he argues his case convincingly, leaving readers in no doubt that one of the first acts of Donald Trump, the president-elect — appointing a replacement for the conservative justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February — will have a telling and lasting impact on American society and culture.

Perhaps it was ever thus, whether across the Pond, here or elsewhere. Consider the father of The Man Without Qualities in Robert Musil’s novel. Set against the last days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Musil’s modernist novel focuses on Ulrich, a man of talent and ability who has become indifferent to his qualities, so much so that he arguably has none. Ulrich’s father is an eminent lawyer who takes “an assiduous part in the expert work of legislation” — and yet manages to “combine his superior and gently emendatory knowledge with the suggestion that his personal loyalty could nevertheless be depended upon”.

Next to The Spy of Venice, by the intellectual property barrister Benet Brandreth. Brandreth, son of Gyles, is not only a lawyer and Filipino martial arts instructor, but also an authority on William Shakespeare. In his impressive debut novel, he explores the first of the playwright’s “lost years”, a seven-year period from 1585 to 1592. Brandreth conjures a remarkable tale in which Shakespeare, fresh from an indiscretion in Stratford-upon-Avon, travels first to London and then to Venice. It has intrigue, twists and turns and wonderful dialogue, including a line that if applicable to Shakespeare may sometimes be apt, if also cautionary, for lawyers of all shapes and sizes, wherever they are: “He’s clever, but he reckons without the consequences of his cleverness.”
Alex Wade’s novel Flack’s Last Shift is published by Blue Mark Books, £14.99