Tap the gear icon above to manage new release emails.
Follow Daniel Greenberg to get new release emails from Audible and Amazon.
I am a lawyer specialising in legislation and the legislative process, presently serving as Counsel for Domestic Legislation in the House of Commons. I write about UK legislation and law, and also about Jewish law and ethics.
In the 2021 New Year's Honours List I was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) for services to Parliament.
I am the Editor of Craies on Legislation, Stroud’s Judicial Dictionary and Jowitt’s Dictionary of English Law (2010, 2015, 2019), the Editor in Chief of the Statute Law Review, the Editor of Halsbury’s Laws on Statutes, and a contributing editor to the Oxford English Dictionary. I am also General Editor of Westlaw UK for Thomson Reuters.
My book Laying Down the Law was published by Thomson Reuters in 2009. It was inspired by a Minister with whom I had considerable dealings while I was still a civil service Parliamentary Counsel, who when he heard I was about to leave the civil service suggested that I write the "inside story" of how legislation gets its precise shape. So the book looks at people - Ministers, special advisers, House authorities, departmental lawyers, Parliamentary Counsel, and others - and considers how each of them influence the actual words of legislation, focusing particularly on ways in which some of them have less influence than they or others think (notably Ministers) while others have a great deal more (notably the House authorities). Then I look at some practical implications of procedural issues - such as how the rules of scope affect the final product. Finally I let off steam about some problems and issues in legal language today - such as the three myths of plain English, the use of purpose clauses and the increasing incidence of mistakes in legislation and how the courts are dealing with them. As I say at the end of the book, it became something of a self-propelling rant which was very cathartic to write; hopefully it is also fairly light to read.
My book How to Become Jewish and Why Not To was written in 2009 to draw attention to some of the major defects of the conversion process as carried out in the United Kingdom, warning prospective converts about how they are likely to be treated, and aiming to encourage the Jewish community to treat actual and prospective converts better. I am pleased to say that some have found it helpful, although I fear the problems that it outlines have if anything got worse rather than better since I wrote the book.
In October 2017 I published What If God's A Christian - An annotated compilation of blog posts from The Sceptic Blog, an orthodox but sceptical Jewish view of the world. For many people, organised religion creates or contributes to the world’s most significant problems today, and causes or foments division, mistrust and hatred. But most people for whom religion is important would like it to be part of the solution, and not the world’s biggest problem. What If God's A Christian provides reactions to a wide range of events and issues (including a mini-series on business ethics) from an orthodox but sceptical Jewish perspective, in an attempt to demonstrate that a religious approach can contribute ideas that people of other religions, or no religion, may find interesting and even helpful.
In October 2020 I published A Tale of Two Rabbis - Faith and Fraud, a novel about housing benefit fraud in the orthodox Jewish community. It highlights through fiction the extremes of piety and corruption that co-exist within a religious community, told through the eyes of a student who becomes more disillusioned with the community as he becomes more impressed with the saintliness of individuals within it.
Read more
Read less
