A review by coops456
In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law by Sarah Langford

4.0

There was no one truth, there was no one story. Instead there were, behind every case, just webs of messy lives.

Highly recommended. Several of the chapters are eye-openers that will stay with me.

Remarkably unpolitical - the swingeing cuts to public services are touched upon only tangentially, perhaps due to her husband being a (now former) Tory MP - this book should be force-fed to every Home Secretary and Justice Minister, just to give them a teeny-tiny insight into the everyday work of the English courts, both civil and criminal, and the grave importance thereof.

Langford covers a breadth of cases in these 11 chapters. The alleged crimes include theft, assaulting a police officer, rape, false imprisonment, burglary, cottaging, child pornography. The civil cases centre on the family court and orders concerning children, raising issues of safeguarding, parental alienation, coercive control, physical violence.