My legal hero: Thomas More

One-time lord chancellor’s principled defence of the rule of law is an ideal that all lawyers should aspire to, writes Linda Lee

Portrait of English lawyer, politician, and writer Thomas More (1478 – 1535) …

… While his legacy remains complex and academics continue to dissect his work and argue over what Thomas More wrote, thought and represented in the heady political, religious and social context of the 15th and 16th centuries, I admire him for that most fundamental of things; his passion for, and commitment to, the rule of law.

Although it has been suggested his most famous work, Utopia, is a sustained satire on the rule of law, I choose to take from it the deep affinities between the rule of law and humanism. In fact, it has been said that More was the “most human” of lawyers. …

Linda Lee has been president of the Law Society since July 2010