Edward Rees

Research student

Edward Rees is affiliated with The Open University Law School.

You can email Edward Rees directly; but for media enquiries please contact a member of The Open University's Media Relations team.

Biography

Edward is a first year research student in the FBL. He is married with two adult children and live in Hackney, East London. His current personal interests are walking, gardening and music. He was a defence barrister for forty years who specialised in homicide, public order and mental health cases. He also developed a ‘white collar crime’ practice in fraud, money laundering, insider trading and asset recovery law. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1998 and was an adviser to the Law Commission, a member of the executive committee of the Criminal Bar Association and of the General Council of the Bar. 

Current research

Public Opinion and the Nineteenth-Century Bar: Mixed Reviews?

This study investigates the contradiction between, on the one hand, the standing of barristers as an elite in the hierarchy of the Victorian professions and in the public imagination and, on the other, the obloquy heaped upon the morality of the Bar in contemporary literature and large sections of the press. In particular, it takes as illustrative the episode of the passing of the 1836 Prisoners’ Counsel Act and its aftermath. The Act gave defence counsel the right to make speeches in trials on indictment (apart from treason). This new latitude and the limits of professional conduct were egregiously tested in a series of notorious trials - ‘the licence of counsel controversies’. These, in turn, led to the so-called ‘War between the Bar and the Press’. Nevertheless, members of the Bar, many of them holding high government office, simultaneously exerted considerable influence over both politics and society. As a counterpoint which helps to understand the survival of the Bar’s prestige, the study contrasts the reputational narrative of the contemporary medical profession.

Supervisors

• Dr Caroline Derry
• Dr Simon Lavis

Publications

• Blackstone's Guide to the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (5 editions).
• Blackstone's Criminal Practice - Annual chapters on Confiscation and Asset Recovery.
• The Law of Public Order and Protest (Ed. HHJ Peter Thornton QC)