Legal London
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Legal London is the area now centred around The Royal Courts of Justice, although the lawyers arrived here 500 years before the Courts were built.
Although there are important Courts elsewhere in London (such as the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, and the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster), almost all barristers' chambers and many of the best firms of solicitors surround the Royal Courts and the four Inns of Court, at the Western limits of the City of London, from the River Thames in the South, for a mile Northwards to Gray's Inn.
Here judges and barristers will be seen walking and talking in their distinctive white bands (a form of cravat), clerks wheel about trolleys full of books and papers, the shop windows display wigs and three piece suits or £250 tomes, and preoccupied or jubilant litigants, witnesses, solicitors, law students, journalists and demonstators mill about and fill the pubs, clubs and wine bars after work.
The Temple Church is a surviving relic of the ousted Knights Templar, and the Dickensian squares and chambers which cannot be rebuilt or updated may give a distorted impression of the UK's thriving modern international common law industry; or perhaps they might distort an antiquated legal system. Interminable Dickensian cases are no longer heard in the Hall of Lincoln's Inn, but The Royal Courts themslves, primarily for civil cases and criminal appeals in the High Court and Courts of Appeal, remain probably the best free theatre in London.
