16th August - Law News

Edition 5347: LawNewsIndex is a UK based daily legal news archive on Law, Lawyers, Law Firms, Jurisprudence, Legislation, Litigation, Legal Ethics, Human Rights and Social Justice related issues since 2011.

Today's Highlighted Video: A Reference by the Attorney General for Northern Ireland of a devolution issue under paragraph 34 of Schedule 10 to the Northern Ireland Act 1998 Case ID: UKSC/2025/0042

A selection of important developments in the world of law and justice (for a comprehensive look at the news and events, please visit @theLawMap Twitter/X feed):

Saturday Conversations on Law

• Former law lecturer Baroness Ruth Deech has warned the government has no clear mandate for introducing automatic legal rights and obligations for cohabiting couples without their consent | New Law Journal
• Two-thirds of drivers “have never heard of whiplash reforms” - Legal Futures
• French court blocks Macron’s social media ban for under-15s. Constitutional council says curbs infringe freedom of expression and privacy as president vows to rework legislation
• The Ministry of Defence (MoD) must pay the bulk of the legal costs in the military deafness litigation, the High Court has held | New Law Journal
• Landowner claiming for ACV compensation loses appeal against Cambridgeshire council's refusal to pay costs | Law Gazette
• Does AI work for conveyancers? We asked those on the front line - Legal Futures

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The Sunday Editorial: 

LawNewsIndex was founded as a way of cataloguing the ongoing changes in the UK justice system as well as documenting social justice related conversations as observed through the Twitter/X account @thelawmap. In the decade and half since 2011, LawNewsIndex has collated thousands of articles documenting how the justice system in Britain had responded to local and international events. The ongoing archive on justice, law and societal changes covers each day since December 2011. Since July 2026, a new weekend feature comprising essays, comments and original creative writing on an eclectic range of subjects is being published as The Sunday Editorial from a range of writers:  

Juxtaposing the Grace and Notions of Moral Injustice in Marilynne Robinson’s masterpiece Gilead: There are novels that seem to arrive carrying their own weather. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is one of them: slow, luminous, haunted by the Midwestern light, its pages inhabited by the grave intimacy of a man who knows that he is dying. Its narrator, John Ames, is an elderly Congregationalist minister in the small Iowa town of Gilead, writing to the seven-year-old son he will not live to see grow up. He writes about the ordinary things – marriage, childhood, his father, an old friend, a sunset – but beneath these modest particulars lies a question of almost unbearable scale: how might a human being learn to live morally in a world in which certainty is so easily mistaken for righteousness?

Published in 2004, and cited by none other than Barak Obama as one of the books that 'shaped his worldview', Gilead can seem at first like an unlikely candidate for the contemporary novel. There are no fashionable metropolitan discontents here, no knowing ironies, no conspicuous dismantling of inherited certainties. Instead there is a preacher, a Bible, a dying man's desk and an accumulation of memories. Yet Robinson's achievement is to make this apparently old-fashioned apparatus feel radical. She takes religious faith seriously without making it simple, and she asks whether organised religion might be most valuable not when it gives us moral certainty, but when it teaches us to distrust our capacity to judge.

Ames has spent his life speaking about sin and grace. He has buried the dead, baptised children, married couples, consoled the bereaved. Religion has become almost indistinguishable from the texture of his consciousness. He does not merely believe in Christianity; he thinks through it. Memory itself becomes theological. A childhood recollection can suddenly disclose an ethical problem; a domestic scene can become an intimation of mortality.

But Ames is not a figure of serene spiritual authority. He is, rather, a man perpetually discovering the inadequacy of his own moral confidence. This is especially apparent in his troubled relationship with Jack Boughton, the wayward son of his oldest friend. Jack has behaved badly. He has lied, caused suffering and acquired the sort of reputation that allows a community to settle comfortably upon a verdict. Ames is tempted to do precisely that.

And then, almost against himself, he hesitates.

That hesitation is the moral centre of Gilead. Robinson understands that judgement is one of the most seductive pleasures available to us. To decide that another person is selfish, wicked, weak or irredeemable is to establish, by implication, the reassuring fact of one's own superiority. Organised religion can intensify this temptation, because it possesses an elaborate vocabulary with which to sanctify distinctions between the saved and the fallen.

Ames's Christianity, however, continually frustrates this impulse. Grace enters precisely where judgement would like to close the case.

Robinson's religious imagination is not sentimental. Grace does not mean pretending that evil is innocence or that consequences do not matter. Jack has done real harm. The moral difficulty is that his wrongdoing cannot be allowed to exhaust his identity. A human being remains, in the Christian sense, unfinished. However grievous the sin, there remains the possibility – perhaps even the obligation – of seeing beyond it.

This makes Gilead a novel about the moral hazards of institutions as much as about the consolations of belief. Religion may teach humility, but religious institutions are made by human beings, and human beings are remarkably gifted at turning humility into hierarchy and faith into certainty. The church can become a place where people learn compassion; it can also become a place where compassion is rationed according to doctrine, class, prejudice or respectability.

Robinson's great subtlety is that she never resolves this contradiction by simply rejecting organised religion. Ames remains a minister. He continues to believe. The church remains, for him, imperfect but indispensable. What matters is not the fantasy of a pure institution, but the possibility that an inherited tradition might contain resources for criticising its own failures.

In this sense, Gilead belongs to a peculiarly American argument about religion and morality. The novel's spiritual inheritance is inseparable from the country's history of slavery, abolition, violence and political conscience. Ames's grandfather was an abolitionist; his father was a pacifist. Their competing moral visions haunt him. What does Christian love require when confronted with injustice? Is violence ever justified in the defence of another human being? Can pacifism itself become a form of moral evasion?
Such questions give the novel a political depth that its quietness can obscure. Robinson's Iowa is not an idyll floating above history. Its tranquillity has been purchased, as tranquillities often are, by the suffering of people whose names and stories have been pushed beyond the frame.

The implication is unsettling. It is possible to be a good man in one's private life and still participate in a morally compromised society. It is possible to be tender towards one's wife, affectionate towards one's child and generous towards one's neighbours while remaining blind to the structures of injustice surrounding them. Personal decency is not the same thing as moral courage.

And yet Gilead resists the contemporary temptation to turn this recognition into cynicism. Robinson is not interested in exposing hypocrisy for the pleasure of exposure. She is interested in what might come after the exposure: what moral vocabulary remains when our institutions have failed us, when our own motives are suspect, when righteousness itself can become a species of vanity?
Her answer is grace.

The word can sound embarrassingly antique. Robinson makes it strange again. Grace, in Gilead, is not merely divine forgiveness; it is an imaginative discipline. It asks us to contemplate another person without reducing them to the sum of their offences. It requires us to admit that the person we have condemned may contain depths we cannot see, just as we ourselves contain motives we would rather not examine.

This is why Ames's letter to his son becomes more than a father's farewell. He is trying to bequeath not a creed so much as a way of looking. He wants the boy to inherit a capacity for wonder, pity and attention. The moral life, Robinson suggests, begins in the refusal to believe that anyone is finally comprehensible.

There is something almost unfashionably beautiful in this. In an era when religion is frequently discussed either as a dangerous residue of the past or as a bulwark against modernity, Robinson offers a third possibility. Faith can be understood as a practice of moral uncertainty: a discipline that continually interrupts the pleasure of believing oneself right.

That does not make Gilead an easy book for the secular reader, nor does Robinson soften the theological claims of her narrator for the sake of accessibility. The novel asks to be met on its own ground. But that ground is ultimately human rather than doctrinal. Death, forgiveness, love, regret and the fear that we have not lived well enough are not exclusively religious concerns.

Ames knows he is running out of time. His letter is therefore an attempt to leave behind what cannot quite be handed down: wisdom, perhaps, but also humility before the unknowable. He has spent a lifetime speaking for God. At the end, what moves him most is the difficulty of speaking with certainty at all.

That may be the deepest morality Gilead discovers within organised religion. Not obedience. Not purity. Not the comfortable possession of truth.

Rather, the hard and beautiful habit of leaving the door ajar.

For if grace means anything, Robinson implies, it must begin where certainty ends: in the recognition that the person before us is more mysterious than our judgement allows, that the self we trust is less innocent than we imagine, and that moral life consists, perhaps, in learning to make room for both facts at once.

Read last week's Editorial 

Taz Rahman holds a masters in ethics and social philosophy from Cardiff University. He is a South Wales based writer and literary documentary maker. His debut poetry collection 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' was published by Seren Books and longlisted for the Laurel prize in 2024. He is widely published in leading poetry magazines and anthologies and had founded Wales' first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet. 

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