Tilly has the day from hell when she's sacked from her barristers' chambers in the morning, then finds her husband in bed with her former best friend in the afternoon. She escapes to her mother, Roxy – a sassy solicitor whose outrageous take on men, work and family life is the despair of her more conventional daughter. Roxy comes up with a radical plan for their future – they'll set up an all-female law firm which will only champion women who have been cheated, put upon, attacked, ripped off or ruined by the men in their lives. In court, Tilly finds herself up against Jack Cassidy, the smooth-talking, politically incorrect, legal love god who broke her heart at law school. Jack is fluent in three languages – English, sarcasm and flirtation... but if he's so loathsome, then why is she committing Acute Lust in the 3rd degree? When a case lands on the doorstep that threatens to change all their lives, Tilly finds herself dangerously close to taking the law into her own hands... Will Jack's cunning ways and expertise in emotional break and enter derail her quest for justice? Or will the women take on the boys... and win? Praise for Kathy Lette: 'Fabulous, fast-paced, funny & unapologetically female. Nobody does it better.' DEBORAH FRANCES-WHITE, THE GUILTY FEMINIST 'Deliciously rude and darkly funny, but with compassion and humanity at its heart. Read with relish.' NICOLE KIDMAN 'Kathy Lette can turn from raunchy farce to the most tender emotion in a trice.' STEPHEN FRY

Through an examination of the history of the rules that regulate police interrogation (the Judges' Rules) in conjunction with plea bargaining and the Criminal Procedure Rules, this book explores the 'Westminster Model' under which three arms of the State (parliament, the executive, and the judiciary) operate independently of one another. It reveals how policy was framed in secret meetings with the executive which then actively misled parliament in contradiction to its ostensible formal relationship with the legislature. This analysis of Home Office archives shows how the worldwide significance of the Judges' Rules was secured not simply by the standing of the English judiciary and the political power of the empire but more significantly by the false representation that the Rules were the handiwork of judges rather than civil servants and politicians. The book critically examines the claim repeatedly advanced by judges that "judicial independence" is justified by principles arising from the "rule of law" and instead shows that the "rule of law" depends upon basic principles of the common law, including an adversarial process and trial by jury, and that the underpinnings of judicial action in criminal justice today may be ideological rather than based on principles.

Law, Judges and Visual Culture analyses how pictures have been used to make, manage and circulate ideas about the judiciary through a variety of media from the sixteenth century to the present. This book offers a new approach to thinking about and making sense of the important social institution that is the judiciary. In an age in which visual images and celebrity play key roles in the way we produce, communicate and consume ideas about society and its key institutions, this book provides the first in-depth study of visual images of judges in these contexts. It not only examines what appears within the frame of these images; it also explores the impact technologies and the media industries that produce them have upon the way we engage with them, and the experiences and meanings they generate. Drawing upon a wide range of scholarship – including art history, film and television studies, and social and cultural studies, as well as law – and interviews with a variety of practitioners, painters, photographers, television script writers and producers, as well as court communication staff and judges, the book generates new and unique insights into making, managing and viewing pictures of judges. Original and insightful, Law, Judges and Visual Culture will appeal to scholars, postgraduates and undergraduates from a variety of disciplines that hold an interest in the role of visual culture in the production of social justice and its institutions.

Internationally, the case of early modern Sweden is noteworthy because the state building process transformed a locally dispersed and sparsely populated area into a strongly centralized absolute monarchy and European empire at the beginning of the 17th century. This anthology provides fresh insights into the state-building process in Sweden. During this transitional period, many far-reaching administrative reforms were carried out, and the Swedish state developed into a prime example of the early modern ‘powerstate’. The contributors approach Sweden’s rise to greatness from the point of view of personal agency. In early modern studies, agency has long remained in the shadow of the study of structures and institutions. This novel approach enables us to expose the difficulties, setbacks and false steps that the administration had to deal with. State building was a more diversified and personalized process than has previously been assumed. Numerous individuals were also crucially important actors in the process, and that development itself was not straightforward progression at the macro-level but was intertwined with lower-level actors. Each chapter in this volume employs partially different methods depending on the source material and subject. This means that both qualitative and quantitative material is combined, different ways of making sense of it (i.e. research traditions) are brought together and a multi-method design is used in analyzing source material. One of the central methods is the systematic use of previous biographical research. We want to give the individuals and their actions under discussion a background that reflects the contemporary structures of individual life cycles. With the existing biographical research, it is possible to create a comprehensive set of data that provides the general outlines of individual lives or the career tracks of various estates or social groups, and even to construct collective biographies of certain groups.

'Crab & Winkle' is a warped Shepherd's Calendar for the age of climate change: a journal of Australian poet Laurie Duggan's first year as a resident in England, it centres specifically on the area of East Kent where he lives, featuring excursions and interludes elsewhere in Britain, the Continent and North Africa. The book's title comes from an old railway route in the heart of Duggan's new territory.