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Good morning. I sometimes tease my lawyer friends and say "At least there are no lawyers in heaven". This is not because lawyers are worse, or better, than any of the rest of us but simply because by then all disputes will have been resolved. Alas now, of course, lawyers are very much needed. The courts are bustling and every day the media reports some high profile case whether it is to do with sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, a celebrity claiming defamation or a billionaire wanting a divorce. Now it is possible to take a very pragmatic view of law. In order to live together in tolerable peace we need an agreed set of rules and a system of adjudication in the application of those rules. Disputes are inevitable and its most basic a resolution in court is better than a resolution by violence. But it is possible to have a much higher view of law, one which did indeed capture the imagination of Europe for centuries and is still held today by many people. On this view law begins not with any human arrangement but in the Eternal will. At the heart of the universe is a moral law, which is reflected in human laws when they are just and which as St Paul stressed, is written in the heart of every human being. Laws have to be agreed and made but what makes lawmakers strive to make just laws? What made people after World War II draw up that great body of international human rights law? There seems to be some mystery at the heart of things prompting us to make laws that reflect some abiding moral imperative. This older view of law was really ambitious. It said that the moral ordering of the universe was also reflected in its natural ordering, in the way the sun rises and the tides ebb and flow, the regularities of nature that science pursues so successfully today. All this they thought was sheerly beautiful. Nobody expressed this vision more powerfully than Boethius the 6th century philosopher. As he wrote: What binds all things to order, governing earth and sea and sky is love…O happy race of men, If the love that rules the stars also rules in your hearts. In losing that vision our civilisation lost something but when a child cries out “It’s not fair” and, at a much more serious level, when the survivors of the Grenfell tragedy say they want justice, it still echoes in our minds.