Thought for the Day

Good morning.
When we talk about justice, we picture punishment, verdicts delivered, sentences pronounced, the drama of a courtroom.
We talk less about what justice is for, what kind of life it is meant to make possible.
I’ve been thinking about that because I’ve just finished jury service.
For days I sat with eleven strangers, reminded how fragile justice is, how much it depends on ordinary people listening carefully, trying to hold someone else’s story without breaking it.
The law, up close, feels less like marble and more like human breath.
That experience drew me back to Rose Heilbron, a woman from Liverpool and one of the great figures of British legal history.
My own family comes from that same stretch of Liverpool, and I imagine what it meant for girls like my mother to see someone who sounded a little like them taking her seat in the Old Bailey.
Her career was marked by remarkable firsts: among the first women appointed King’s Counsel, the first to lead a murder prosecution, the first woman judge at the Old Bailey.
By simply being there, she changed who Britain believed could speak with authority.
Her most lasting contribution came in the 1970s when she chaired a committee on the treatment of women reporting rape and sexual assault. It argued that complainants’ identities should be protected and their sexual history not used to discredit them.
Behind those reforms lay a conviction: justice cannot function if it humiliates the wounded. A system that deters the vulnerable from coming forward manufactures silence.
That conviction feels close this week. Recently released court documents in the United States again exposed how wealth and influence enabled the abuse of women and girls, perpetrators and collaborators protected with a vigour the victims’ could only dream of.

Jewish tradition teaches that law exists to guard human dignity – kevod habriyot. The Bible warns: do not oppress the stranger, “for you know the soul of the stranger.” The rabbis understood the stranger as anyone made small by power, anyone whose story can be turned against them.
Rose Heilbron’s work lived inside that teaching. She understood that a courtroom should be a place where shame changes sides, where those exposed are finally covered, and those who abused power stand in the light.
Perhaps that is what justice is for: not the last word of a story, but the first breath after a long holding of breath –a fragile peace in which the vulnerable are believed, and the rest of us are changed by having listened.
Because a society is judged not only by how it punishes the guilty, but by how carefully it guards those who risk everything to speak.

05 FEB 2026

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