After working as a barristers' clerk, man and boy, for over thirty years Stephen Ward wrote a collection of reminiscences of his working life to date. He describes some of the characters he's met together with some of the more amusing and repeatable anecdotes from his life in the legal profession. During preparation of the manuscript he was contacted unexpectedly by Claire Long, the daughter of Frank Parsliffe who had written about his 50-year career as a barristers' clerk from before the Second World War. As a young clerk in London, Stephen had worked with Frank Parsliffe (known as Tom) and it was agreed his unfinished memoirs would be combined with Stephen's book. The result is a fascinating account of how the work of a barristers' clerk has changed over the best part of a century. Part One of the book is Stephen Ward's story of his own career from the 1980s until the present day and the technological changes that have taken place during that time. Frank Parsliffe's career spanned a very different time from the 1930s to the 1980s and his memoirs in Part Two reflect that. Frank also recounts his experiences as a young man in the wartime RAF. After four years away in the forces he returned to a very different chambers.

Judges and legal scholars talk past one another, if they have any conversation at all. Academics couch their criticisms of judicial decisions in theoretical terms, which leads many judges-at the risk of intellectual stagnation-to dismiss most academic discourse as opaque and divorced from reality. In Divergent Paths, Richard Posner turns his attention to this widening gap within the legal profession, reflecting on its causes and consequences and asking what can be done to close or at least narrow it. The shortcomings of academic legal analysis are real, but they cannot disguise the fact that the modern judiciary has several serious deficiencies that academic research and teaching could help to solve or alleviate. In U.S. federal courts, which is the focus of Posner's analysis of the judicial path, judges confront ever more difficult cases, many involving complex and arcane scientific and technological distinctions, yet continue to be wedded to legal traditions sometimes centuries old. Posner asks how legal education can be made less theory-driven and more compatible with the present and future demands of judging and lawyering. Law schools, he points out, have great potential to promote much-needed improvements in the judiciary, but doing so will require significant changes in curriculum, hiring policy, and methods of educating future judges. If law schools start to focus more on practical problems facing the American legal system rather than on debating its theoretical failures, the gulf separating the academy and the judiciary will narrow.

In his new book, Lewis D. Sargentich shows how two different kinds of legal argument - rule-based reasoning and reasoning based on principles and policies - share a surprising kinship and serve the same aspiration. He starts with the study of the rule of law in life, a condition of law that serves liberty - here called liberal legality. In pursuit of liberal legality, courts work to uphold people's legal entitlements and to confer evenhanded legal justice. Judges try to achieve the control of reason in law, which is manifest in law's coherence, and to avoid forms of arbitrariness, such as personal moral judgment. Sargentich offers a unified theory of the diverse ways of doing law, and shows that they all arise from the same root, which is a commitment to liberal legality.