So, a loved one is a lawyer? Naturally, he or she has already got everything, even, in today’s world, a good PR advisor. But there’s more to life than hourly charge-out rates, conditional fee arrangements and image. There’s reading. Here are the Magnificent Seven Christmas Books for Lawyers.
1. Weird Cases by Gary Slapper.
Weird Cases: Comic and Bizarre Cases from Courtrooms Around the World is the book of Professor Gary Slapper’s hugely entertaining Times column. In it, you’ll learn of the judge would flipped a coin to decide a case and his colleague in surrealism, a man who demanded a foot massage from a clerk. All human life is here but beware: you will never enter a courtroom with quite the same faith in justice again.
2. 101 Ways to Leave the Law by Alex Steuart Williams.
No surprise that an author affiliated with the Times makes the Magnificent Seven. It is, after all, the lawyer’s paper of record. This one is by the man who pens the cartoon for the Law pages. He wouldn’t contend that it possessed Proustian depth but he would be within his rights to say that it’ll make you – and your nearest, dearest lawyer – chuckle.
3. Baby Barista by Tim Kevan.
Barrister-turned-writer Kevan seems to have secured more plaudits than a Nobel prize winner with his first novel, a romp through London’s Inns of Court. Baby Barista is fast, furious and effervescent, a Bucks Fizz-meets-Machiavelli of a book. Fans might care to slip a book token amid its pages – Kevan is penning a sequel.
4. Happy Hour is for Amateurs: Work Sucks. Life Doesn’t Have To by The Philadelphia Lawyer.
The anonymous scribe exposes the “fraudulent, greedy underbelly of a system in which ambitious lawyers are only as valuable as their last set of billable hours”. It’s non-fiction, then. Genre – and authorial identity – aside, the book has echoes of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Well worth a read, in other words.
5. Wrecking Machine by Alex Wade.
OK, we admit it. This one came out a while ago. It’s got precisely nothing to do with Christmas and lacks any kind of contemporaneous peg. But its author – another lawyer-turned-writer – tells us that he will be having an operation over Christmas, one caused, in part, by the very boxing that he described (rather well, we think) in Wrecking Machine. Admirably, Wade says he has no regrets, but he also allows that he could do with a royalty cheque. We’re happy to commend his book, especially to all lawyers thinking of taking up boxing. The inscription on the first page writes itself: “Don’t”.
6. Defending the Guilty: Truth and Lies in the Criminal Courtroom by Alex McBride.
An unflinching look at British criminal justice by a practising barrister not afraid to write under his own name. Excellent.
7. Tom Bingham and the Transformation of the Law, edited by Mads Andenas and Duncan Fairgrieve.
No less a lawyer than Shami Chakrabarti recommends this “giant of an essay collection,” whose highlights include Dame Mary Arden on the tradition that links Mill to the Human Rights Act and Clayton and Tomlinson on Bingham’s vital role during the War on Terror. Hefty, heady, huge – but no lawyer should be without it. Just leaven with Wade, season with McBride and stir with Kevan and your Christmas legal cocktail will run and run.
The image, from Santarchy & Santacon, reminds us of Bad Santa. If we were listing films this would be a definite contender, both for its relentless biting satire and, if you’re a lawyer, the challenge of working how many separate criminal offences Santa and his little helpers commit.
