The Supreme Court

I'm not an enthusiast for the Supreme Court.

The final court of appeal used to be the House of Lords. I thought of that as a symbol that, as Parliament creates laws, it should have the last word about their interpretation.

Of course it was only the Law Lords who heard appeals, so the role of Parliament was purely symbolic, but a symbol may be better than nothing.

I should have preferred a change in the opposite direction, by making the final arbiter a group of parliamentarians who were not all lawyers.

Laws tend to be drafted by lawyers who produce laws of extreme complexity that require highly paid lawyers to interpret them, and which usually have what are called 'loopholes' which must eventually be blocked by creating even greater complexity.

I don't think lawyers deliberately make laws complicated so that they can earn substantial fees interpreting them, but I suspect that their experience of the financial consequences makes complicated law less repellent to lawyers than it is to the rest of us.