6 No. 76 JUSTICE arsaw is a city where the Jewish story and the legal story intersect with unique force. A city where the rule of law was destroyed — catastrophically, systematically, and with consequences that still echo. And yet a city where the Jewish People showed, even in their darkest hour, what it means to insist upon human dignity, upon moral justice, upon the irreducible humanity of the individual. To speak about law and justice as Jews, in Warsaw, is to speak with the weight of memory on our shoulders. What I have just said would have been true, I suggest, at any time since the Shoah. But it is now especially true after October 7, 2023. We gather in a city where we have all seen, usually in black and white films and photographs, how thriving Jewish life was overrun by devastation. And we now look at those scenes with the images of a more recent devastation imprinted forever on and in our minds — in all their terrible reality and in sharp and unflinching colour. My father, zichrono livracha, passed away in March 2025. At times when I was growing up, it seemed to me that he was a Jew, and therefore he was a lawyer. At other times, it seemed to me that he brought his legal persona to animate and enhance his Jewish life. Because of course he was both a lawyer and a Jew. At the same time. And in a manner which was not just complementary, but essential. He was someone for whom the essence of what it is to be a lawyer, and the essence of what it is to be Jewish, went hand in hand. So let me start with one of his favourite stories, one we all know so well. We begin with the first Jewish lawyer — or perhaps the first Jewish advocate — Abraham. Confronted with divine judgment on the evil city of Sodom, he asks the most audacious and the most enduring question in all of legal philosophy: Hashofet kol ha’aretz lo ya’ase mishpat – “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” In that one line is the foundational and fundamental Jewish attitude to law: that power must be accountable; that justice must be universal; that even the highest authority is subject to moral scrutiny. Our tradition begins with a cross-examination, and not just any cross-examination. It is a cross-examination conducted between man and God —but where man asks the questions, and God has no answer — because there is no answer. There was no divine answer to Abraham’s question because as Jews, we do not only believe that God acts justly. As Jews, we believe that God is justice. For Jews, law has never been a luxury. It has been a necessity. It has been our shield when we were vulnerable, our framework when we were scattered, and our identity when everything else was taken away. We are, by temperament and by experience, a legal people. We argue not only because we enjoy argument — we argue because we believe that justice depends on reasoned disagreement. That belief sits at the heart of the role of the Attorney General in England and Wales. The Attorney is a political figure — he or she sits for the governing party in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords — but the Attorney is also the constitutional guardian of the rule of law. The role of Attorney General in this guise is a peculiarly British invention: part minister, part jurist, part lightningrod. It is an office that requires you to give independent legal advice even when it is inconvenient; to say “no” to colleagues who would prefer you to say “yes”; and to uphold — without fear or favour — not only what is lawful, but what preserves public confidence in the law itself. And it is not a job for the faint-hearted. You need a thick skin, a sharp mind, and the ability to say, with a perfectly straight face to a senior politician whose career depends on your approving his policy: “I’m afraid the law does not agree with you.” Well, ladies and gentlemen, you do not need me to tell you that if the role of the Attorney General in London is difficult, the role of the Israeli Attorney General is … Olympian. In Israel, the Attorney General stands at the Justice and Law in Warsaw – and Beyond Keynote Address* Lord (David) Wolfson, KC * Keynote address at the IJL International Conference on “Antisemitism and the Jewish People in the Legal Aftermath of October 7th,” delivered in Warsaw, November 19, 2025. W
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