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17 Denning L.J. 1 (2004-2005)

handle is hein.journals/denlj17 and id is 1 raw text is: THE DENNING LAW JOURNAL LAW AND LITERATURE - THE CONTRIBUTION OF LORD DENNING Sir Martin Nourse * At the beginning of the 21st century an audience consisting mainly of lawyers will not need to be persuaded that the law has a contribution to make to literature or, at any rate, that it has a literature of its own. A hundred years ago it might have been different. The Oxford Book of English Prose, published in 1925, contained extracts from only three reported judgments. By a coincidence, it was in the Yale Review of the same year that Benjamin Cardozo's Law and Literature first appeared, since when the opinion has been growing, certainly amongst lawyers, that there must be something in it. For myself, the defining moment was the publication in 1965 of Louis Blom- Cooper's The Literature of the Law.1 More that thirty-five years later, in his Margaret Howard Memorial Lecture entitled Judges among the Literati at Oxford in 2001 Sir Louis confessed to being unashamedly an anthologist of legal writings. If an element of self-deprecation is here to be detected, I would altogether reject it. To be in the company of such as Palgrave and Wavell is a cause for pride, especially where the sources are so diverse and largely unavailable to the average reader. I read every word of The Literature of the Law, almost at one sitting. Lord Birkett's forward is itself a work of literature, reminding us that it is not only judges who have contributed, but great advocates like John Somers and Thomas Erskine. Here is what Macaulay said of Somers, later Lord Chancellor under William III, as junior counsel for the Seven Bishops in 1688, the greatest constitutional trial in our history: Somers rose last. He spoke little more than five minutes; but every word was full of weighty matter; and when he sate down his reputation as an orator and a constitutional lawyer was established. But just as the art of the great conversationalists survives only through the pens of their contemporaries, and then only if they have a Boswell to record them, so advocacy survives on in the record of the reporter. While advocacy so recorded may itself be literature, the record lacks the voice, the gesture and deportment which contributed to its greatness. Not so the report of a judgment which, though its delivery may often have impressed and persuaded, is primarily * Former Lord Justice of Appeal, former Vice-President, Court of Appeal (Civil Division), Acting Master of the Rolls, 2000. '(New York: Macmillan, 1965).

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