It’s important for public service interpreters to understand exactly what is covered by legal aid, because those are the only areas they’ll be working in and those are the only subject areas covered by the DPSI Law. Legal aid is mainly covered in Chapter 7. Chapter 6 describes the difficult work that barristers and solicitors do. To anyone who has ever had to attend or work on a floating trial, my heart goes out to you.

Chapter 5 explains how schemes like the Victim’s Code are not helping the victims at all-this is also where the term “ floating trial” is introduced. Chapter 4 describes how a lack of staff and funding means that some cases are poorly prosecuted, and that leads to terrible outcomes for people who do not have strong support networks and are unable to fight for what they deserve. Chapter 2 covers the magistrates’ court-I really enjoyed the author calling it “as busy as an A&E department on a Saturday night.” Chapter 3, which explains remand and bail, was eye opening. Chapter 1 is an overview of the courts system and an introduction to Crown Court. The book is made up of twelve chapters, and provides an in-depth look into things that other legal books tend to avoid. But ultimately, I would not recommend it for someone studying for the Diploma in Public Service Interpreting in Law for a few reasons that I’ll get to in a minute. I would definitely recommend it for people who want to peek behind the curtain and understand how the criminal justice system really works in England and Wales. Just knowing about the Secret Barrister is useful, they have a blog and still post regularly about criminal law.

It beat out the Dialogue Interpreting book I reviewed in April by 2 years to become newest book I have ever reviewed on my profile. The book I’m reviewing this week is called The Secret Barrister and the author of the book is anonymous.

The secret barrister book review