Christopher Vajda QC was the UK judge at the Court of Justice of the European Union from 2012 until the withdrawal of the UK from the EU in January 2020 when his mandate ceased. This is the text of the keynote speech he gave at the BEG spring conference on 22 May 2021.
Welcome to the new website of the Bar European Group and the European Advocate, the journal of BEG.
The articles from the most recent Spring 2021, and Spring 2020 editions can be found here, and we look forward to posting new material as the UK continues to find its place following its withdrawal from the European Union.
Our annual conference will be held in Salzburg in Austria, on 29-30 May 2022.
Salzburg, Austria, 29th-30th May 2022 – save the date
In 2022 the Bar European Group’s annual overseas conference will once again be taking place in situ, in Salzburg.
Further details will be released soon.
Lord Lloyd-Jones JSC remembers Sir John and Sophie Laws. Sir John Laws was president of the Bar European Group from 1994 to 2018. Lord Lloyd-Jones, the president of the Bar European Group, remembers him for his learning and sense of fun.
Sir John and Lady Sophie Laws attended the annual conferences of the Bar European Group for many years. We have reproduced an extract from one Sir John’s speeches – delivered as President of BEG in Rome in 2007, and Lady Sophie Laws’ candid insights into her role as “historical researcher”.
This issue is a tribute to our late President, Sir John Laws, who passed away on 5 April 2020.
Phillip Souta, the Advocate’s editor, spoke to Geoffrey Cox QC MP via video-link from his Devon constituency about honouring national agreements and what it means to be a barrister.
When Hugo de Groot and John Selden engaged in their famous disputation over the freedom / dominion of the seas in the early seventeenth century they were laying the foundation for a new science of international law. Before then, before the ‘modern’ period of history, there were indeed rules governing some relations between princes and on the conduct of war (status of heralds on the battlefield, rights to sack cities which had resisted siege).
But when the age of princes gave way to the age of States conduct became governed by bureaucracy rather than personal relations between monarchs. In that context a more systematic regulation was needed.
Rupert Paines of 11 KBW gives a personal view of the UK Government’s recent consultation on retained EU law, in which the Bar European Group took part.
George Peretz QC of Monckton Chambers looks at the subsidy control provisions of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement and what they mean for the United Kingdom’s future state aid regime.
the European Advocate 