Sir Bernard Crick - Sir Bernard Crick is currently Emeritus Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College London. He is a former Adviser on Citizenship to the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and then on citizenship as naturalization and integration for the Home Office. He is the author of In Defence of Politics and of George Orwell: a Life.
Claire Fox - Claire Fox is the director of the Institute of Ideas (IoI), which she established to create a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint.
Fox initiated the IoI while co-publisher of the controversial and ground-breaking current affairs journal LM magazine (formerly Living Marxism). The IoI has since worked with a variety of prestigious institutions in Britain and abroad.
Fox has a particular interest in education and social issues such as crime and social exclusion. She is highly critical of authoritarian developments such as New Labour's anti-social behavior orders (ASBOs).
Fox is a panelist on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze and is regularly invited to comment on developments in culture, education and the media on TV and radio. Fox writes regularly for national newspapers and a range of specialist journals. Fox has a monthly column in the Municipal Journal.
Jon Holbrook - Jon Holbrook is a barrister who practices in public law at 2-3 Gray's Inn Square, London. He has previously written for a number of publications including spiked, The Times and the Independent.
Philip K. Howard - Philip K Howard chairs Common Good, a national bipartisan coalition organized to restore common sense to American law, and is a well-known leader of legal reform in America. He is the author of many books about the consequences of the legal system including The Collapse of Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom and The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America.
Phillip contributes occasionally to the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, and speaks before judicial, government and professional organizations around the country. Philip earned his law degree from the University of Virginia, where he was a member of the Order of the Coif and a member of the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review.
John Peysner - John Peysner is a Solicitor and Professor of Civil Justice at Nottingham Law School. He has edited The Litigator and was founding Course Leader of the LLM in Advanced Litigation. He has seventeen years experience in litigation practice, including Law Centres, Legal Aid and latterly, defendant Medical Negligence.
He writes on conditional fees, the civil justice changes, litigation skills and funding, risk management and assessment and clinical negligence. He has conducted research on case management, costs, civil procedural systems, consumer attitudes to solicitor's services and testing in house against contracted legal services. He was a member of the Lord Chancellor's Committee on Claims Assessors (The Blackwell Committee) and wrote the first draft of the report. He is a member of the Civil Justice Council. He is editor of the Law Society's Civil Litigation Handbook.
Litigation and litigation avoidance - tying ourselves in knots? with Sir Bernard Crick, Jon Holbrook, Philip K Howard, John Peysner and Claire Fox speaking at a panel discussion during the Institute of Ideas' The Battle of Ideas Conference 2006.
Civil law is increasingly concerned not merely with especially important or complicated transactions such as marriage or major business deals, but with everyday life, regulating everything from school trips to adverts on TV. Relationships once considered beyond the purview of law are now scrutinized by armies of lawyers, often at the request of the parties involved. This has led to complaints about a litigious society in which people are too afraid of being sued to do anything that might result in a summons to court. Is litigation a necessary corrective to the perils of the free market? Is it a problem of ambulance-chasing lawyers and a litigation industry, or does our litigious culture point to a deeper problem of distrust and mutual suspicion between the public and our institutions?- IoI
Camera by David Dunbar for http://www.18doughtystreet.com