feet of clay.

Over at Crooked timber, there's an interesting post marking the 25th anniversary of the St. Paul's riots. There's a link in the post to this paper [pdf!], which discusses race and policing in urban areas. The author of the paper gives, in illustration, Lord Denning's infamous quote from What next in the Law, which I'd quite forgotten about. My Dad thought Denning instantiated the ideal of the liberal judge, and bought every book of his that he could find. This hero-worship passed naturally to me, and so it was quite disappointing, when I came to England, to discover that Denning was capable of saying, publicly, such rubbish. Ah well.