Two glimpses of Conor Gearty
A master in promoting the public understanding of law
Remembering the late Conor Gearty.
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Two events in the City of London: separated by twelve years in time and by a few hundred yards in distance.
Yet the events were in quite different worlds.
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It is 2000, and the Human Rights Act 1998 is about to have full effect. The Law Society have warned all solicitors in England and Wales that the legislation will have a profound impact and it would be negligent not to know about it. Law firms are scrambling to get information on this strange and supposedly powerful new statute.
And so in a conference room of an international law firm, hardened corporate and commercial lawyers are about to find out about the law of human rights.
The speaker is Conor Gearty.
And instead of talking at the assembled City lawyers, he goes around the room engaging with them, with genuine curiosity asking about transfers of types of property and the operation of trusts and pension funds. He then ties the responses into practical examples of how the European Court of Human Rights has dealt with (or not dealt with) the rights to property and to privacy and to a fair hearing.
Beside themselves, the audience become fascinated.
And in an extraordinary exercise in exposition he even conveys the then novel doctrine of proportionality and how almost every right under the Human Rights can be interfered with, and how the 1998 Act is likely to work in practice.
A session which could have gone so badly could not have been done better.
*
It is now 2012, and just around the corner and up the road from that law firm there are mass tents outside St Paul’s Cathedral.
It is the time of Occupy London.
And in one of the larger tents there is a speaker meeting on protest and the rule of law, and one of the speakers on the panel is Conor Gearty.
Again he engages with everyone, talking about the big legal case then before the courts on the legality of the “occupation”, but also about protest and the rule of law generally.
He explains, again with illustrative detail, about the how the European Court of Human Rights and our domestic courts have dealt with (or not dealt with) the rights to free expression and to free assembly and to a fair hearing.
And he talks about how the rule of law can bind the powerful, as well as the powerless. He wrote about the event here (where he was characteristically generous and kind about the other speaker).
In his write-up of the event he concluded:
Last night’s event was full of hope – hope that society can be transformed; hope that our culture can find the levels of solidarity that it so desperately needs; hope that equality can be achieved rather than merely spoken about.
But this hope never collapsed into utopian illusion.
Nor did it threaten at any time to morph into a cynical aggressiveness towards a public who refuse to share the dream.
There was an intelligent awareness of the time dreams take to be realised, of the hard work that utopia demands and of the need to be there for the long haul. Minds are not changed by singular actions, however singular. They are changed when society comes to regard these singular actions as the rule rather than the exception, when common sense shifts onto the side of the erstwhile heretic. This can take a long time or happen very quickly indeed. But it can always happen. No situation is so bad that dreams – with courage, determination and patience – cannot be realised.
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The hopes of 2012 now seem a long time ago.
Occupy London is as dated in its way as the London Olympic opening ceremony.
But he was right - making things better may take a long time, and will require a long haul.
“No situation is so bad that dreams – with courage, determination and patience – cannot be realised.”
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Conor Gearty was a genius in explaining often technical law in a way which related practically to whichever audience he was addressing - judges, lawyers, students, protesters, or the public generally.
(Only days before he died he was on the Prospect podcast discussing the Palestine Action proscription.)
He was also the most brilliant - and relentlessly realistic - of all exponents of a liberal and progressive approach to law.
Perhaps constitutional law - including the law of human rights and civil liberties - should be boring, not exciting.
Yet Conor Gearty was always able to make it genuinely interesting.