The challenge for the courts is making the most of new technologies and practices without losing sight of what worked in the past, a justice of the UK Supreme Court said yesterday.

In a lecture called Breathing Life into the Law: Achieving Access to Justice in the Modern State, Lady Rose of Colmworth said the best way of achieving this was a blend of creativity and conservatism.

“Like Moses and Jethro,” she said, “we must innovate without impairing the quality of justice being dispensed.”

Rose was delivering the Lionel Cohen lecture, which has been given annually at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem by a series of leading legal figures over the past 70 years. It was set up in honour of Lord Cohen of Walmer, the first Jewish law lord, who sat in the UK’s highest court from 1951 to 1960.

The lecture, sponsored by his family, is organised by the British Friends of the Hebrew University. It was well attended yesterday by members of the law faculty at the university’s Mount Scopus campus.

An edited text of Rose’s remarks will be published in due course. In the meantime, you can listen to the lecture as delivered by clicking the button above. You can also download the audio as a podcast.

* Note to readers: this is not the podcast I announced after the BBC decided to stop broadcasting Law in Action on Radio 4. Plans for that project are well advanced and I hope to announce more details at the end of June. The podcast itself will be launched in the autumn.

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