Four murder cases, four remarkable theories of motive, and the dangerous difference between telling a convincing story and proving a crime.

In criminal law, the prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Or, in England and Wales, make the jury sure of the defendant’s guilt.

That is quite a demanding standard.

And rightly so.

But I’ve been looking at several murder cases recently where the prosecution’s explanation of why somebody committed a crime appears to have been considerably more imaginative than the evidence could justify.

One involved a father discussing life insurance.

Another involved an alleged Satanic ritual.

A third involved a supposed sexual encounter that turned violent.

And the fourth, rather remarkably, involved a man’s private diary and a comment about another man’s physique.

All four cases resulted in convictions that were subsequently overturned.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

At what point does a prosecution stop proving what happened and start telling a story about what might have happened?

Because a convincing motive can be a powerful thing.

Give a jury a plausible explanation for why somebody would commit murder, and the rest of the evidence may suddenly seem to fit.

The trouble is that a good story can make unrelated facts appear connected.

And sometimes the story is wrong.

1. James Joseph Richardson: Murder for Life Insurance That Didn’t Exist

Florida, United States — 1967

In October 1967, seven children in Arcadia, Florida, died after eating food contaminated with the pesticide parathion.

Their parents, James Joseph Richardson and his wife Annie Mae, were working in an orange grove when the children became ill.

It was a horrifying crime.

Seven children, all from the same family, poisoned in a single day.

Investigators needed to establish who had contaminated their food.

And attention eventually turned towards their father.

Why would a man murder his own children?

The prosecution had an answer.

Money.

Richardson had recently discussed purchasing life insurance policies for his family.

That detail became part of the case against him.

It suggested that he might have planned to profit from the deaths of his children.

On the surface, that sounds like a recognisable motive.

Life insurance fraud has featured in genuine murder cases.

But there was a rather significant problem.

Richardson hadn’t actually purchased the policies.

He couldn’t afford them.

There was no insurance payout waiting for him.

And the defence was not told this crucial information during the original proceedings.

Imagine the difference between these two statements:

The defendant took out life insurance policies on his children shortly before they were murdered.

And:

The defendant discussed buying life insurance but never bought any.

The first might reasonably attract investigative attention.

The second is a conversation about financial planning.

Yet once investigators suspect somebody of murder, even an ordinary conversation can begin to look sinister.

Richardson was convicted in 1968 and sentenced to death. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

He spent more than twenty years behind bars.

In 1989, his conviction was set aside after a special investigation revealed serious failures to disclose evidence, including information undermining the insurance theory and the credibility of prosecution witnesses.

The case also raised questions about the children’s babysitter, Betsy Reese, who had served their meal. She was not convicted of the poisonings.

Richardson’s story illustrates a particularly dangerous form of reasoning.

Investigators identified a possible motive.

The motive made Richardson look suspicious.

And that suspicion helped support a prosecution in which important contradictory information had been withheld.

But a possible financial incentive is not evidence that somebody administered poison.

Especially when the supposed financial incentive never actually existed.

The insurance policy made for a compelling motive. Its absence was rather less convenient for the story.

2. Garr Keith Hardin and Jeffrey Clark: The Satanic Ritual

Kentucky, United States — 1992

In April 1992, nineteen-year-old Rhonda Sue Warford was found murdered in Kentucky.

She had suffered multiple stab wounds.

Her death was brutal, and the investigation eventually focused on Garr Keith Hardin and Jeffrey Clark.

The two men were convicted of her murder in 1995.

But the prosecution’s theory of motive was extraordinary.

It suggested that the killing was connected to Satanic worship and ritual sacrifice.

This was the early 1990s, when public fears about alleged Satanic activity had already influenced parts of American culture and criminal investigation.

The prosecution argued that Hardin and Clark were involved in occult practices and that Warford’s murder was connected to those activities.

Among the evidence presented was a bloodstained cloth found in Hardin’s home.

The prosecution characterised the blood as animal blood associated with ritual sacrifice.

There was also microscopic hair comparison evidence said to connect Hardin to the victim.

Now, if you tell a jury that somebody has been involved in Satanic rituals, almost anything unusual can begin to acquire a sinister interpretation.

A bloodstained cloth is no longer simply a bloodstained cloth.

It becomes an artefact of a secret ceremony.

An acquaintance becomes a fellow conspirator.

And a murder becomes a ritual sacrifice.

Except the later scientific evidence told a very different story.

DNA testing established that the blood on the cloth belonged to Hardin himself, consistent with his explanation that he had cut himself.

Further testing also undermined the hair evidence that had been used to connect him to the crime.

The case revealed serious problems with investigative conduct and testimony.

In 2016, the men’s convictions were vacated.

In 2018, the remaining murder charges were dismissed.

Both had spent more than twenty years in prison.

The important lesson isn’t that an unusual motive can never be genuine.

People do sometimes commit crimes for bizarre reasons.

The problem arises when the strangeness of a theory becomes a substitute for demonstrating that it is true.

If the prosecution alleges a ritual murder, it still has to prove the murder and the defendant’s involvement.

The ritual theory doesn’t get a discount on the burden of proof simply because it sounds dramatic.

And in this case, some of the evidence used to support the theory was subsequently discredited.

The prosecution had a story involving Satanic sacrifice. The laboratory eventually had some rather different information about the blood.

3. Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito: The Sexual Encounter That Became a Murder Theory

Perugia, Italy — 2007

In November 2007, British student Meredith Kercher was murdered in Perugia, Italy.

She was twenty-one years old.

Her death became the subject of an enormous international investigation and media spectacle.

Among those accused were her American flatmate Amanda Knox and Knox’s Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.

The prosecution’s early theories included the suggestion that Kercher’s murder had resulted from a sexual encounter or game that escalated into violence.

Other proposed explanations involved personal hostility, tensions between flatmates and disputes over money.

The motive theories shifted as the case progressed.

Which raises an interesting question.

If investigators are confident about who committed a murder but cannot settle on why, what exactly is holding their theory together?

Of course, prosecutors are not generally required to prove a motive as a separate element of murder.

A person can commit murder for reasons that remain unknown.

And a changing theory of motive does not, by itself, establish that a defendant is innocent.

But it can reveal how uncertain the prosecution’s reconstruction of events has become.

Knox and Sollecito were convicted in 2009.

Their convictions were overturned in 2011, reinstated following further proceedings, and ultimately annulled by Italy’s highest court in 2015.

The final judgment identified major investigative failures and serious weaknesses in the evidence linking them to Kercher’s murder.

Rudy Guede was separately convicted of involvement in her killing.

What interests me about this case is the relationship between the evidence and the narrative.

The proposed motive was not simply a detail added after guilt had been established.

It became part of the attempt to explain how the accused people fitted into the crime.

And when a prosecution presents a vivid account of events, it can become difficult to distinguish between what has been demonstrated and what has been inferred.

A supposed sexual encounter can sound like an explanation.

Personal tensions can sound like motive.

And a collection of ordinary interactions can begin to resemble a sinister pattern.

But resemblance is not proof.

Meredith Kercher’s murder required a reliable investigation, not merely a convincing reconstruction of what might have happened.

A story about why people might have committed a murder cannot replace evidence that they actually did.

4. Barri White and Keith Hyatt: The Diary Entry

Milton Keynes, England — 2000

Now let’s return to Britain.

In December 2000, nineteen-year-old Rachel Manning was murdered after a night out in Milton Keynes.

Her boyfriend, Barri White, was convicted of her murder in 2002.

His friend Keith Hyatt was convicted of perverting the course of justice, on the allegation that he had helped dispose of Rachel’s body.

Both men maintained their innocence.

And this case contains one of the most extraordinary examples of a proposed motive that I’ve encountered.

In documentary coverage of the case, an account is given of a diary entry supposedly written by Hyatt.

According to that account, Hyatt had written something along the lines of:

“Barri has a nice body.”

The suggestion was that prosecutors had explored the possibility of a romantic or sexual relationship between the two men as part of a proposed motive for Rachel’s murder.

I haven’t independently verified the exact diary wording or precisely how the alleged relationship was presented at trial, so those details should be treated as a documentary account rather than an established quotation from the proceedings.

But even taken as described, the reasoning raises an important question.

What exactly does a comment about another person’s appearance establish?

Perhaps attraction.

Perhaps admiration.

Perhaps a passing observation.

Perhaps something entirely different.

Without additional evidence, the words cannot tell us whether a relationship existed.

And even if a relationship had existed, that would not establish that either man wanted Rachel dead.

Yet consider how easily a narrative could develop.

Two men are friends.

One writes something complimentary about the other’s appearance.

Investigators suspect a secret relationship.

The supposed relationship becomes a possible motive.

And suddenly, a sentence in a private diary is being asked to carry an extraordinary amount of explanatory weight.

It’s rather like reading somebody’s shopping list and deciding that their purchase of bin bags must have been preparation for disposing of a body.

The interpretation might be possible in a particular context.

But possibility is not evidence.

The Forensic Evidence That Fell Apart

The diary account wasn’t the central reason the convictions were overturned.

That distinction matters.

The original prosecution also relied heavily on forensic evidence suggesting that Rachel’s body had been transported in Hyatt’s van.

An expert identified microscopic particles found on Rachel’s clothing and on a seat in the vehicle.

The particles were presented as an unusual combination, supposedly supporting a connection between the body and the van.

But journalists working on the BBC’s Rough Justice programme investigated the evidence.

Their work helped expose a fundamental problem.

The particles were not nearly as distinctive as the original interpretation suggested.

They could be produced by ordinary disposable cigarette lighters.

And they were far more common than the jury had been led to believe.

In other words, the supposed forensic link was considerably less compelling than it had appeared.

White and Hyatt’s convictions were quashed in 2007.

White was acquitted at his retrial in 2008.

Then, in 2013, Shahidul Ahmed was convicted of Rachel Manning’s murder after DNA evidence connected him to the crime.

The consequences of the original errors were devastating.

White and Hyatt lost years of their lives.

Rachel’s family endured a prolonged struggle for justice.

And the person eventually convicted of her murder remained free for years after the wrong men had been imprisoned.

This is what makes the case so important.

The danger wasn’t merely that investigators may have attached too much significance to an ambiguous personal remark.

It was that a prosecution narrative existed alongside forensic evidence whose apparent significance was later shown to be unreliable.

A convincing story and an apparently scientific link can reinforce each other.

Until somebody examines the assumptions.

And discovers that neither supports the conclusion as confidently as originally claimed.

A diary entry can tell us what somebody wrote. It cannot, without more, tell us why somebody else was murdered.

5. Why We Find Motives So Convincing

What connects these four cases?

Money.

Satanism.

Sex.

A supposed secret relationship.

They are very different stories.

But they all offer something that human beings find difficult to resist.

An explanation.

We don’t like unanswered questions.

When something terrible happens, we want to know why.

A murder without an obvious motive feels incomplete.

And once somebody supplies an explanation, our minds begin arranging the available facts around it.

In software engineering, there’s a familiar danger here.

Suppose a system crashes.

A developer notices that the crash occurred shortly after a software update.

The update becomes the prime suspect.

Every subsequent investigation is interpreted through that assumption.

Logs are examined for evidence of the update causing the problem.

Other possibilities receive less attention.

Eventually, somebody discovers that the actual fault was a failing hardware component.

The update was merely a coincidence.

This is one reason good debugging requires us to distinguish between a hypothesis and a demonstrated cause.

Criminal investigations face a similar challenge, with vastly greater consequences.

Investigators develop hypotheses because they have to.

They cannot investigate every conceivable explanation indefinitely.

But a hypothesis should guide the search for evidence.

It should not dictate what the evidence is allowed to mean.

Once the theory becomes the framework through which every fact is interpreted, contradictory information can begin to look like an inconvenience rather than an opportunity to reconsider.

That is confirmation bias.

And when liberty is at stake, it can be catastrophic.

6. Motive Is Not Proof

There’s an important legal point worth making.

Motive evidence is not inherently improper.

It can be relevant.

If somebody has threatened a victim, stands to gain financially from their death or has expressed a desire to harm them, those facts may legitimately form part of a prosecution case.

But motive is not generally an element that must be proved to establish murder.

And the existence of a possible motive does not establish that the accused committed the offence.

Plenty of people have reasons to dislike somebody.

Very few murder them.

Plenty of people discuss insurance.

That doesn’t make them poisoners.

Plenty of people write ambiguous things in diaries.

That doesn’t make them killers.

The difficulty is that a motive can feel like the missing piece of a puzzle.

Once we think we know why, we may become less demanding about the evidence establishing who.

And that’s precisely backwards.

A motive may help explain a crime once there is reliable evidence connecting someone to it.

It should not be used to manufacture that connection.

7. The Difference Between a Courtroom and a Storytelling Competition

A courtroom is an unusual place.

Two sides present competing accounts of events.

Witnesses speak.

Documents are introduced.

Experts explain their findings.

Lawyers argue about what the evidence means.

And at the end, somebody must decide whether the relevant legal standard has been met.

Narrative is unavoidable.

Human beings understand events through stories.

A prosecution cannot simply place hundreds of disconnected facts before a jury and hope that meaning emerges by itself.

But there is a danger when storytelling becomes more persuasive than the underlying evidence.

A dramatic motive may be memorable.

An unusual coincidence may be intriguing.

An ambiguous remark may sound suspicious.

None of those qualities makes something true.

A jury should not be asked to choose the most entertaining explanation.

It should be asked to determine whether the prosecution has proved the defendant’s guilt.

That requires something more demanding than narrative coherence.

It requires reliable evidence.

And it requires the willingness to recognise when the story doesn’t fit.

Conclusion: Beyond a Reasonable Story

James Joseph Richardson was said to have a financial motive involving life insurance policies he never bought.

Garr Keith Hardin and Jeffrey Clark were accused of a murder supposedly connected to Satanic ritual, supported by forensic claims later discredited.

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito faced shifting theories about the circumstances and motive behind Meredith Kercher’s murder before being definitively acquitted of it.

And Barri White and Keith Hyatt were wrongly convicted in a case where an alleged relationship formed part of the reported narrative, while the supposed forensic link to Rachel Manning was eventually dismantled.

These cases do not establish that every prosecutor deliberately invented a story.

Nor do they mean that motive evidence should be excluded from criminal trials.

They demonstrate something more subtle.

A theory can become so compelling that people begin treating it as though it has already been proved.

And when that happens, ordinary details acquire extraordinary meanings.

A conversation becomes a financial plot.

A bloodstained cloth becomes evidence of ritual sacrifice.

Personal tensions become a murder scenario.

A passing remark becomes a secret relationship.

The danger is not imagination itself.

Investigators need imagination to consider possibilities.

The danger is forgetting where imagination ends and evidence begins.

Because the prosecution may have explained why somebody could have committed a murder.

But the question a criminal court must answer is whether it has proved that they did.

Beyond a reasonable doubt is a standard of proof. Beyond a reasonable story is not.

Or why the simplest word isn’t always the most precise.

When I lived in America, I noticed something rather interesting about the way people talked about the legal profession.

They called lawyers lawyers.

Sometimes they called them attorneys.

But they didn’t generally distinguish between solicitors and barristers in the way we do in England and Wales.

If someone needed legal advice, they called a lawyer.

If someone was being prosecuted, they hired a lawyer.

If someone threatened to sue them, they announced that their lawyer would be in touch.

Simple.

Back in Britain, we have a rather more elaborate vocabulary.

You might need a solicitor.

Or a barrister.

Or perhaps a solicitor-advocate.

And before you know it, a conversation about getting legal advice has turned into a small examination on the structure of the English legal profession.

Which raises a question.

Why does the word lawyer sound so immediately understandable, while solicitor sounds like something you ought to have studied before you’re allowed to use it?

1. The Beautiful Simplicity of the Word Lawyer

Let’s examine the word itself.

Lawyer.

It sounds like exactly what it means.

A person who works with the law.

You don’t need to know anything about the legal profession to appreciate the basic idea.

Silicon Valley (HBO)

We have gardeners who work in gardens, builders who build things and lawyers who work with the law.

English doesn’t always make life this straightforward, so perhaps we should appreciate the occasion.

Now consider solicitor.

What exactly does a solicitor solicit?

Clients?

Advice?

Documents?

The word doesn’t immediately reveal the profession it describes.

In fact, its history is rather interesting.

Solicitor comes through French from a Latin root associated with urging, prompting or setting something in motion.

In medieval English, it could describe someone who acted on another person’s behalf or conducted their affairs.

That makes considerably more sense once you know the history.

A solicitor was somebody who pursued matters for someone else.

The trouble is that this explanation requires knowing the history.

The word lawyer, meanwhile, simply gets on with the job.

2. Why Britain Has Solicitors and Barristers

England and Wales developed a legal profession with distinct roles.

Historically, solicitors dealt extensively with clients, legal paperwork, transactions and the preparation of cases.

Barristers specialised in advocacy, particularly in the higher courts, and in providing specialist legal opinions.

The distinction grew out of centuries of institutional development rather than somebody sitting down one afternoon and designing the most understandable legal system imaginable.

And the boundaries are not as rigid today as the traditional description might suggest.

Solicitors can appear in courts and tribunals, with suitably qualified solicitor-advocates able to exercise rights of audience in higher courts.

Barristers can, in appropriate circumstances, accept instructions directly from members of the public.

Nevertheless, the two professions remain separately regulated and retain distinct professional identities.

So the word solicitor does communicate something important.

It identifies a particular legal qualification.

It isn’t merely a more elaborate synonym for lawyer.

And that’s where the British terminology has a genuine advantage.

It tells us more precisely what sort of legal professional we’re dealing with.

Assuming, of course, we already know what a solicitor is.

3. America: Everybody’s Lawyer, Nobody’s Solicitor?

The United States largely uses a different vocabulary.

The words lawyer and attorney are commonly used for people licensed to practise law.

An American lawyer might advise clients, prepare documents, negotiate settlements and represent people in court, subject to the rules governing their practice and jurisdiction.

The familiar English division between solicitor and barrister isn’t generally how the American profession is organised.

That doesn’t mean American lawyers all perform identical work.

Far from it.

They specialise in criminal defence, family law, immigration, commercial litigation, intellectual property and countless other fields.

But their professional titles don’t usually reproduce the English solicitor-barrister distinction.

There is, however, a lovely linguistic complication.

America hasn’t entirely abandoned the word solicitor.

It survives in certain official titles, most famously the Solicitor General, who represents the federal government’s interests before the United States Supreme Court.

And in everyday American English, a solicitor might also be somebody knocking on your door trying to sell you something.

Which could produce a rather unfortunate misunderstanding if you announced that a solicitor had arrived at your house.

In England, you might be expecting legal advice.

In America, you might be expecting somebody to sell you double glazing.

4. Precision Versus Understanding

Here’s where the question becomes more serious.

In England and Wales, solicitor is a protected professional title.

Someone cannot simply declare themselves a solicitor without being entitled to use that description.

The term lawyer, however, does not have the same legally protected status.

According to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the word has no defined meaning in UK law and does not, by itself, guarantee that the person using it holds a regulated professional qualification.

That is an important distinction.

Imagine two people advertising legal assistance.

One describes herself as a solicitor.

The other describes himself as a lawyer.

To somebody unfamiliar with the legal profession, both descriptions might sound equally reassuring.

But they don’t necessarily communicate the same regulatory status.

A solicitor’s professional standing can be checked against the relevant register.

The generic title lawyer alone does not establish equivalent credentials.

Suddenly, the word that seemed unnecessarily complicated has a very practical purpose.

Solicitor is less intuitive, but more precise. Lawyer is more intuitive, but potentially less informative.

Neither word is universally better.

They solve different communication problems.

5. When Professional Language Becomes a Barrier

This reminds me of something I’ve been encountering while trying to navigate the English justice system.

There is an enormous difference between a system being technically correct and a system being understandable to the people who need to use it.

A court employee might know exactly what a URN is.

A solicitor might immediately recognise the distinction between a case number and an enforcement account number.

A barrister might understand the procedural implications of a particular court order without giving it a second thought.

But an ordinary member of the public may not know any of those things.

And why should they?

Most people don’t spend their lives studying legal procedure.

They encounter it when something has gone wrong, when a dispute arises, or when they need professional assistance.

That is probably the worst possible moment to discover that the language itself requires an introduction.

The legal profession needs technical vocabulary.

Precision matters when people’s rights, liberty and property are at stake.

But precision should not become an excuse for making explanations unnecessarily difficult.

A good professional can use the technically correct term and then explain what it means.

A good public service should do the same.

6. A Software Engineer’s Perspective

In software engineering, we spend considerable time thinking about interfaces.

An interface is how one system communicates with another.

And a good interface should communicate enough information for its user to understand what is happening without requiring intimate knowledge of everything underneath.

Imagine a website with two buttons.

One says:

Submit.

The other says:

Execute asynchronous transaction persistence operation.

Both might ultimately do the same thing.

One tells the user what they need to know.

The other tells the user that the developer has recently discovered a thesaurus.

Legal terminology can present a similar problem.

A specialist term may be perfectly accurate within the profession but confusing to somebody outside it.

That doesn’t mean we should abolish technical language.

It means we should design explanations around the audience.

Perhaps lawyer is the useful public-facing category, while solicitor and barrister provide the necessary professional detail.

We already do something similar in other industries.

A person might describe themselves as an engineer before explaining that they specialise in software, civil engineering or electronics.

The broad term establishes the general field.

The specific term explains the expertise.

Why shouldn’t legal communication work in much the same way?

7. Should We Just Call Everybody a Lawyer?

Not quite.

There’s a risk in simplifying professional language too far.

If we treated lawyer, solicitor and barrister as interchangeable, we could obscure meaningful differences in qualifications, regulation and the services someone is authorised to provide.

And when someone is paying for legal advice, those differences matter.

But I do think there’s a case for leading with the language people naturally understand.

For example:

I’m a lawyer, qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales.

That tells somebody two useful things.

First, the person works in the legal profession.

Second, they hold a specific professional qualification.

It’s understandable without sacrificing precision.

And it doesn’t require the listener to have completed a preliminary course in English legal history.

So, What Should We Call Them?

Perhaps the answer depends on what we’re trying to communicate.

If I’m discussing the legal profession generally, lawyer seems perfectly sensible.

If I’m identifying a particular qualification in England and Wales, solicitor or barrister is more informative.

And if I’m speaking to somebody who has never encountered the British legal system, I might use both.

Because the purpose of language is not merely to demonstrate that the speaker understands something.

It’s to help the listener understand it too.

That’s a lesson that extends far beyond the legal profession.

Our institutions accumulate specialised vocabulary over centuries.

Sometimes that vocabulary preserves important distinctions.

Sometimes it preserves historical accidents.

And sometimes it simply makes ordinary people feel as though they’ve walked into a conversation that began several hundred years before they arrived.

The best legal language should be precise enough to protect people and simple enough to help them.

After all, a lawyer is someone who works with the law.

A solicitor is a particular kind of lawyer.

And explaining that distinction shouldn’t require another lawyer.

What came first: the law or the lawyer?

The law.

There. Mystery solved.

Thank you for reading.

Unfortunately, having answered the question in considerably less time than it takes to get through to the Single Justice Service, I now find myself with an entire blog post still to write.

So perhaps we should investigate.

Because the more interesting question isn’t simply which came first. It’s how we arrived at a world in which ordinary people may need specialist assistance just to understand the rules governing their own lives.

Who settled disputes before lawyers existed?

Who decided whether someone had stolen a goat?

Who determined whether a field belonged to one farmer or another?

And if somebody committed murder, who had the authority to decide what happened next?

Today, we imagine justice taking place inside a courtroom, involving a judge, barristers, solicitors, evidence, witnesses and a considerable quantity of paperwork.

But these features didn’t arrive together.

The history of law is, in many ways, the history of societies trying to solve the same problems with increasingly elaborate machinery.

Let’s start at the beginning.

1. Ancient Mesopotamia: The Law Before the Lawyer

Approximately 2000–500 BCE

Thousands of years before anybody could qualify as a solicitor, the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia were already arguing about property, debts, inheritance, marriage and compensation for injuries.

Human nature, it seems, has remained remarkably consistent.

The famous Code of Hammurabi, produced in Babylon during the eighteenth century BCE, is one of the best-known surviving collections of ancient laws.

It dealt with subjects ranging from commercial transactions to family obligations and physical injuries.

But we shouldn’t imagine it functioning like a modern statute book, consulted by barristers in a courtroom.

Ancient Mesopotamian justice operated through rulers, officials, judges, elders and local institutions. Written contracts, witnesses and sworn statements could play important roles in resolving disputes.

There were people knowledgeable about legal practices, including scribes who prepared documents, but there was no modern profession divided into solicitors and barristers.

If you had a dispute, you might appear before local authorities and present your account.

You didn’t necessarily need a lawyer.

You did, however, need to understand the social hierarchy.

Ancient legal systems often distinguished between people according to status. The penalties and protections available to one person were not necessarily available to another.

So although law existed, equality before the law was far from guaranteed.

This reveals something important.

The earliest legal systems were not simply machines for delivering justice. They were also instruments for organising society and preserving authority.

Law came first.

Fairness was still a work in progress.

2. Classical Athens: The Citizens Become the Court

Fifth and fourth centuries BCE

Now we travel to Athens, where the ancient Greeks developed a particularly interesting approach to justice.

Instead of relying entirely on a professional judiciary, classical Athens used large juries of citizens.

And by large, I mean genuinely large.

Some cases were heard by hundreds of jurors.

Imagine trying to persuade five hundred people that your neighbour had stolen your goat.

You would certainly want to prepare your speech.

In Athens, litigants were generally expected to present their own cases.

There were no barristers in the modern English sense, although professional speechwriters, known as logographers, could prepare arguments for people who could afford their services.

In other words, you couldn’t necessarily hire somebody to stand up and argue for you, but you might hire somebody to write something impressive for you to say.

An early version of outsourcing, perhaps.

The system reflected Athenian ideas about citizen participation, but we must be careful with the word citizen.

Women, enslaved people and many residents who lacked citizenship were excluded from equal participation in the political and judicial system.

Democracy had arrived, but its membership policy was rather restrictive.

Still, Athens gives us an interesting stage in the evolution of law.

The people deciding cases weren’t necessarily professional legal experts.

They were members of the civic community.

And the people presenting arguments weren’t necessarily lawyers.

They were the people involved in the dispute.

That raises a question which still matters today:

Should understanding and participating in justice be an ordinary civic responsibility, or something reserved for specialists?

3. Ancient Rome: The Lawyer Begins to Emerge

Approximately 200 BCE–400 CE

Rome complicates the story.

Which, given what Roman law eventually became, seems appropriate.

As Roman society expanded, so did the complexity of its legal arrangements.

There were disputes over contracts, property, inheritance, citizenship, commercial transactions and the responsibilities of public officials.

And increasingly, people developed specialised knowledge about how those rules worked.

Roman jurists studied and interpreted legal principles. Advocates helped people present arguments. Patrons could assist clients in navigating legal and political institutions.

These weren’t identical to modern solicitors and barristers, but we can begin to recognise familiar professional functions.

Somebody understands the rules.

Somebody else has a problem.

The person with the problem seeks assistance from the person who understands the rules.

The legal profession begins to take shape.

And with it comes a rather interesting development.

The more sophisticated the law becomes, the more valuable legal expertise becomes.

That can be a good thing.

Specialists can challenge unfair accusations, interpret complicated rules and help people defend their rights.

But specialisation also creates dependence.

A system designed to organise society can gradually become difficult for ordinary members of that society to navigate without professional help.

Rome didn’t invent that problem.

It certainly helped demonstrate how far legal complexity could develop.

4. Medieval London: When the City Became Its Own Legal System

Approximately the twelfth to fifteenth centuries

Let’s travel to London, several centuries before anybody could telephone HMCTS and spend half the morning listening to hold music.

Medieval London was already a complicated place.

Merchants traded goods. Landlords collected rents. Apprentices learned trades. Families argued over inheritance. People accused one another of theft, assault and other offences.

Somebody had to settle these disputes.

And there wasn’t one convenient institution called The Legal System into which every problem could be deposited.

London had its own civic institutions, including the Court of Husting, whose history stretches back to the Anglo-Saxon period.

By the Middle Ages, the City’s aldermen, sheriffs and other officials exercised important judicial and administrative responsibilities.

The Court of Husting became particularly associated with matters involving property and inheritance.

Other courts handled different categories of dispute.

There were also royal courts, local customs, ecclesiastical jurisdictions and developing common-law procedures.

If that sounds like overlapping institutional responsibilities, that’s because it was.

Some aspects of medieval London are beginning to sound uncomfortably familiar.

Enter Newgate and the Old Bailey

Newgate became one of London’s most notorious prisons.

The area around it would eventually become closely associated with the Old Bailey and the administration of criminal justice.

But we should be careful not to imagine today’s Central Criminal Court simply transported backwards into medieval London.

The modern building didn’t exist.

Nor did the modern Crown Court.

The courts, their jurisdictions and their procedures developed over centuries.

The surviving published Old Bailey Proceedings begin in 1674, well after the medieval period.

Nevertheless, the underlying problem remained consistent.

London needed institutions capable of hearing accusations, settling disputes, determining guilt and enforcing judgments.

And as the rules became more elaborate, people who understood those rules became increasingly valuable.

By medieval times, England had already developed recognisable legal practitioners, and the Inns of Court became important centres of legal education and professional life.

The lawyer had well and truly arrived.

The law, meanwhile, was becoming a career.

5. London Today: The Old Bailey and the Price of Complexity

Twenty-first century

Now let’s return to London in 2026.

Walk along the Old Bailey in the City of London and you’ll find the Central Criminal Court, crowned by a golden figure of Justice holding her sword and scales.

The present courthouse opened in 1907, although criminal trials in the area have a much longer history.

In 1834, the Old Bailey was formally established as the Central Criminal Court.

Today, serious criminal cases are heard there under an extensive framework of legislation, evidence rules, procedural safeguards and rights of appeal.

Judges direct proceedings and interpret the law.

Barristers present cases and challenge evidence.

Solicitors advise clients and prepare cases.

Juries determine questions of fact in trials where they are required.

And defendants have legal protections that would have been unfamiliar, or entirely unavailable, in many earlier societies.

That is progress worth recognising.

We shouldn’t romanticise ancient courts simply because their procedures were less complicated.

A simpler system isn’t necessarily a fairer one.

The development of legal safeguards has helped protect people from arbitrary punishment, unreliable accusations and abuses of authority.

But there’s an uncomfortable complication.

Have We Made Justice Too Complicated to Navigate?

In ancient Athens, a citizen might be expected to stand up and argue his own case.

In medieval London, disputes could be handled by civic officials familiar with local customs.

Today, even identifying the correct court, prosecuting authority or procedure can require specialist knowledge.

I recently spent several hours contacting government departments in an attempt to trace historical court proceedings associated with MS90 endorsements recorded against me.

Eventually, an enforcement team supplied account references.

The Single Justice Service then asked for identifying information, including the prosecuting authority and offence date.

Reasonable questions, perhaps.

Except that those are among the details I am trying to establish.

I am asking the system to identify the proceedings.

The system is asking me to identify the proceedings so that it can assist.

There’s something almost historically poetic about it.

Thousands of years ago, people could bring disputes before elders.

Today, I have an account reference, an email address and six questions to answer.

And I’m still trying to find the court record.

The Old Bailey’s Digital Irony

Here’s something particularly interesting.

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online provides searchable accounts of nearly 198,000 criminal trials from 1674 to 1913.

Researchers, historians and members of the public can explore centuries of London’s criminal justice history from a computer.

The Open University was among the institutions involved in developing this remarkable digital resource.

Think about that.

We can search accounts of criminal trials conducted in London during the seventeenth century.

Yet tracing the records of a much more recent case can still involve several telephone calls, different departments and a degree of investigative persistence.

There may be perfectly legitimate reasons for that difference, including privacy restrictions, fragmented record systems and the different purposes for which the information was collected.

A historical public archive is not the same thing as a live court administration system.

Nevertheless, the contrast is striking.

It demonstrates what thoughtful digitisation can achieve.

And it invites us to ask why navigating current administrative processes can sometimes feel more difficult than exploring the distant past.

So, What Came First?

The law.

We established that at the beginning.

But the journey from ancient Mesopotamia to the Old Bailey reveals something more interesting.

Lawyers didn’t invent the need for justice.

They emerged as societies developed increasingly elaborate rules, institutions and methods of resolving disputes.

And legal specialisation brought genuine benefits.

It created expertise, improved representation and helped develop procedures intended to protect people from unfair treatment.

But it also contributed to a world in which understanding the law, and sometimes even locating the right part of the legal system, can become a specialist task.

That leaves us with a question for the present.

Have we made justice more sophisticated without always making it more accessible?

Perhaps the next great improvement to the legal system won’t involve inventing another rule.

Perhaps it will involve making the rules, the records and the institutions easier for ordinary people to understand.

After all, the law existed before lawyers.

And presumably, somewhere along the way, people managed to settle disputes without being asked to provide a case reference they were contacting the court to obtain.

The law came first. The lawyer came later. And somewhere along the way, we invented the help desk.