Jonty Claypole

I've put on my pink and brown cardigan.

Winter is very much gone.

with us.

Sophie has an illness at home, so is unable to join for this half of the podcast.

But we do have Brett Walker with us in the studio.

Brett is one of Australia's most renowned barristers.

He began his career in equity, which is to say the sort of cases Dickens critiques in John Weiss and John Weiss.

And since then, he has acted in some of the country's most high profile cases of the

But I'm most struck by warnings he has given in lectures at the Ethics Centre and elsewhere about the legal profession's transformation into, quote, business for profit, which reminds us of the narrator's claim in Bleak House that the one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself.

So, Brett, thank you so much for coming on Secret Life of Books.

I hope I introduced you appropriately.

So at the end of the first half, we looked at the first chapter of Bleak House.

We followed the fog through London and the narrator gliding over the top of London.

And we ended up in Chancery, where the fog is the most intense.

It's where the fog emanates from.

And Brett, I was reading this book again and it suddenly became apparent to me how little I know about the law.

And I'm assuming there'll be some listeners who are in the same predicament.

So can you explain what exactly is chancery and how is it different from other courts of law?

Just to ask an idiot clarification question.

But when you say equity, what do you mean by equity in a legal context?