Swatting (or swotting) silks

From Conor Gearty's review in the latest LRB of UK human rights law texts -

Of the three books, Clayton and Tomlinson is the best organised from this point of view. Every known case is in there somewhere and the arrangement of its sections allows busy lawyers swotting up the night before to find what they are looking for reasonably quickly: the ten cases on a certain meaning to be given to ‘inhumane treatment’ under Article 3, for example, or the 15 dealing with the five relevant aspects of the meaning of ‘civil rights’ under Article 6. Lester, Pannick and Herberg is grander in its presentation, but the irrepressibility of human rights law means that it feels rather short if you want instant help. Beatson, Grosz et al is in some ways the best of the three in that it is more reflective, more inclined to look behind the law to think things through. But for this reason it may appeal more to academics (and even brave members of the public) than to litigating lawyers. The barristers’ method is first to identify the issue (this is often the hard bit), then to run off to the books to find the avalanche of cases that will fill out the written submissions on the issue (this is called ‘the common law method’ – it’s been made much easier by the new variant of it, ‘cut and paste’). Then (another hard bit) all of this has to be distilled into a set of principles or precedents which are applied to the facts in a way beneficial to the client – this is often done in court by means of oral submissions. Because British lawyers are simply far too good and because the system is adversarial, all advocates are in perpetual terror of being found out. I know of a case in which a lawyer’s entire written argument was destroyed when the other side pointed out that the law it relied on wasn’t yet in force.