Talks take place on Thursday afternoons, starting at 2pm, and usually take place in the Lecture Hall, Rewley House, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JA. These are free for Oxford u3a members but you are welcome to attend as a guest for a donation of £5 (£2 for members of all other U3As).
Most talks are recorded on Zoom for the benefit of those Oxford u3a members who are unable to attend Rewley House.
In the event of adverse weather conditions, please telephone Rewley House (01865 270360), to enquire whether the talk has been cancelled.
David Etherington – A Life in the Law
October 8 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
David Etherington KC read Law at Keble in the mid 70s (taught by the great Peter North) and was a member of OUDS and the OUS. He was the Moral Supervisor at Edward Greene’s in Pembroke St for several years before taking up a pupillage at 5 King’s Bench Walk in the Temple where his Head of Chambers was Michael Havers, then Attorney General. The set moved to Red Lion Court (renamed as Red Lion Chambers and its current home) in 1997. As a junior barrister he did a mixture of criminal and common law work, both for the claimant (or prosecutor) and for defendants. He was made a Recorder in 1997 and still sits as a judge in various Crown Courts for part of each year. He took Silk (then as a QC) in 1998.
His cases have included the Essex Range-Rover murders of 1995 (the subject of several films) and that of the so-called ‘Walthamstow Cannibal’ in 2009. He also represented a solicitor in Bristol charged with England’s largest ever legal aid fraud. More recently he appeared in the trial of gay serial killer Stephen Port. He maintains, though, that it is not always the ‘famous’ cases that are the most interesting but often the much smaller ones with quirky law, witnesses and judges. He is a member of Middle Temple and was Reader there in 2022, where his reading (with scenes acted from the original transcript) was on The Trial of the Seddons, a 1912 cause célèbre that has always fascinated him.
As a ‘busman’s holiday’ David also was for a number of years a part-time legal adviser in legal films and dramas including Kavanagh QC and Judge John Deed. He was a member and, chair for several years, of the Professional Conduct Committee of the Bar. He also sits as a judge in the ecclesiastical courts, was Chancellor of the dioceses of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich and Norwich and is currently the Chancellor of the diocese of London. He has also acted as a legal assessor for the General Dental Council and the General Optical Council. He has maintained his links with Oxford and Oxfordshire and for twenty years was a trustee of the Oxford School of Drama in Woodstock.