Gazette journalists naturally read court judgments thoroughly from end to end. But we can’t deny that press summaries, like those that accompany Supreme Court hand-downs, often come in handy. So hats off to judges who provide them – especially after the lady chief justice’s revelations this week.

Appearing before the Lords constitution committee, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill was asked what steps could be taken to counteract ‘inaccurate reporting’ of court rulings. Carr replied that one possibility was providing a press summary – but she has found that writing these can be more difficult than writing the judgment itself. ‘Sometimes when you get to writing the press summary, you think “I’m not sure my judgment is going in the right direction because this isn’t stacking up as I thought it would”.’

Now the LCJ knows how Gazette hacks feel when we try to distil 100 pages of tortuous prose into a 350-word news story.

This was Carr’s first appearance as LCJ at one of Westminster’s more learned committees. Her debut, originally scheduled for 5 June last year, was scuppered by the general election.

She will have recognised some familiar faces in the red chairs. Lord Bellamy, who served as justice minister in the last two years of the Conservative administration, asked about the possibility of ‘press judges’ who, in the Netherlands, explain court decisions to help support accurate reporting.

This would be better still for hacks, but our venerable legal system retains a whiff of obscurantism which probably rules it out for now.

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