Dinah Rose QC on Public Law Advocacy
By Rachel Scott
On 14 January, the SEC turned out in force for the first Masters of Advocacy series lecture of the year. Inner Temple Hall was packed: there was no chance of a snowflake or two keeping this audience away when the guest speaker was Dinah Rose QC and the subject advocacy in public law. Dinah needed little introduction. Barrister of the Year and Human Rights Lawyer of the Year in 2009, her involvement in some of the highest profile judicial review applications over the last two years (including the Binyam Mohamed, Cornerhouse and Jewish Free School cases to name but a few) have made her a household name.
The opening remarks of her address recounted how affected she had been as a history student by the lectures of Martin Gilbert, who would present evidence without emotion or judgment, allowing the facts to speak for themselves and leave only one conclusion to the listener. That was clearly a profoundly influential experience on Dinah, whose style of persuasion is famously direct. She told us that the first thing she does in reviewing a junior’s skeleton argument is to excise all the adjectives.
Engaging and thought-provoking, Dinah proceeded to bestow upon us her tips for success in a notoriously competitive field of practice. “Be the advocate you are” was her shorthand for discouraging mimicry of those whose styles we might admire. “Questions are your friend” was the heading under which she explained how to engage with and use to one’s advantage judicial intervention, although there are limits. Dinah described a period during her submissions in the JFS appeal when such was the bombardment of questions from the nine-strong Supreme Court that she was forced by pressure of time simply to ask for permission to move on. One had the impression that if anyone could silence their Lordships with grace and diplomacy, it was Dinah.
Perhaps the best insight into her art came when she encouraged us to, “Find the story in a case.” Not to be confused with playing an empathy card, she was referring to the need for a neat and easily-understood hook upon which to hang a set of submissions. When members of Equitable Life’s failed pension schemes won their claim for judicial review of the Treasury’s decision to reject the Ombudsman’s damning findings against the company, the hook she found was not the inherently emotive story of a group of impoverished pensioners but rather the unreliability of the actuarial report which had been used to prop up the Treasury’s conclusions. The Court needed a reason to find for the claimants. The discredited report was it. This was a fresh and appealing approach to case preparation and one of universal application across practice areas.
The lecture over, our speaker retreated to the comfort of Inner Temple’s finest brocade armchairs to join Desmond Browne QC in a Q&A session. The recently-departed Chairman of the Bar gave a commendable impersonation of a talk show host and teased out some of the personal and professional history of his subject (her hobby: embroidery; her first memory of pupillage: receiving a ticking-off over her unruly hairstyle). She came across as refreshingly honest and self-deprecating during the course of a wide-ranging discussion.
Despite her plainly fierce intellect, Dinah did not appear to consider herself an academic lawyer, professing only to find the law interesting when used as a weapon. Although unsure whether advocacy could ever be taught (“I have never seen it done”), she clearly does view it as craft to be honed. This no doubt came as comfort for those quarters of the Bar struggling not to feel battle-weary in their attempts to put the case for specialist advocates in publicly-funded work.
Following further questions from the audience, we went shivering into a wintry night, encouraged and inspired to find that winning story in the next day’s case. At the end of the evening, Dinah had argued that in her view the lecture had been mis-described; she was no Master of Advocacy but a mere apprentice. On that, and that argument alone, we were unpersuaded.