The public law Bar spans the full range of administrative, public and constitutional law. A variety of work, including a great deal of advisory work, is undertaken in relation to judicial review and the powers and practices of various public bodies. Public law barristers can also be called upon to advise on matters such as the regulation of financial services or the organisation of the National Health Service.

Particular areas within the field include civil liberties and human rights, commercial judicial review, community and healthcare law, disciplinary proceedings and internal administration of public bodies, education law, housing law, planning law, prison law, social services and social security law and other areas of judicial review. Public law work has a European influence, with a steady stream of cases being referred to the European Court of Justice for preliminary rulings and other cases raising the issue of the application of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Alex Ruck Keene is a barrister at 39 Essex Street, a set with a strong reputation in the fields of administrative and public law. He studied history at Oxford before heading across the pond to Johns Hopkins University to do a master's in international relations. On his return from the States, he did the law conversion course in Guilford.

Alex has fond recollections of his pupillage at 39 Essex Street - not least due to its progressive policy of imposing strict clocking-off times on all barristers-to-be. "Pupillage was fine - obviously it's a stressful time, but things were really pretty good here," he says. "The single best thing was that we weren't allowed to be in before 9:00am or after 6:00pm and that was extremely rigorously enforced. It made a vast difference; I know so many people who got into a kind of ‘arms race' with their fellow pupils, thinking they couldn't leave before the other guy. There's a limit to how much any human being can get done in the course of a day anyway. Often, when people stay on incredibly late, it's because they feel they have to; or they're being used for things that may be of use to their pupil supervisor but, quite frankly, aren't teaching them anything."

Alex's move to the Bar was prompted by a desire to get more involved in public policy, so public law was the only route he considered. "That's why I applied to 39 Essex Street - because it's so strong in public law," he explains. "Had I not ended up being able to do public law, I would have left, because that's what I'm interested in. I really like my job and I've got involved in lots of other areas that I wouldn't have necessarily thought would have appealed, but it's the public side of the public law equation which interests me and if I wasn't getting that, I'd be off doing something else."

So what exactly does the work involve? "There are two main aspects to it," says Alex. "Central government and local government; but at the end of the day they boil down to the same thing: either defending or challenging decisions made by public bodies. As public bodies and local government have got their fingers in so many pies, you get exposed to an enormous range of decisions. There are those that affect the most intimate details of peoples‘ lives in social services cases, right up to some of the VAT work I do for HM Revenue and Customs, which have multimillion-pound VAT implications arising from the most abstruse points of EU law."

This interest in the substantive issues behind government policy fires the passions of many at the public law Bar and Alex is no exception. "Because of the set I'm at, I predominantly - not exclusively, but predominantly - act for the respondent, in particular on the central government side, and I find it very interesting learning about what goes into the decision-making process. If you're having to defend a decision, you often have to ask the lay client quite closely why they have done something, because you've then got to go and explain that to the judge. To take an example in the healthcare field, I had to draft a response to a judicial review challenge to a decision on a refusal to grant payment for an incredibly expensive drug for cancer for someone who had very little time left to live. That meant I had to spend a lot of time talking to doctors about how you evaluate quality of life and the cost per ‘quality-of-life year', and all these strange concepts I hadn't previously known existed. I sometimes think of it as licensed nosiness, but it's fascinating."

While a lot of time can be spent in court, Alex points out that the advocacy involved in public law can differ from that in other areas. "One of the big things about public law is that it's very paper based. You do advocacy, but a lot of that is building upon long skeleton arguments that you will have been working on. The other thing is that crossexamination or examination in chief is practically unheard of, because pretty much all of your advocacy is submissions. That said, I was recently doing a habeas corpus application in relation to someone who had been detained in hospital. It turned out there was a strong case that they were there unlawfully, which could only be resolved by finding out exactly what was said by whom to whom and when. The judge had to throw all his other cases out of court and we spent the next two days in court hearing live evidence; everyone was scrambling to work out what was going on and had to respond very quickly."

When it comes to sketching out the skill set of a public law barrister, Alex puts it bluntly. "You've got to have the ability to read and take on board an awful lot of information and deploy it appropriately and quickly. Mastering the details is very important, because you can't bluff in front of a High Court judge; if you try, it becomes immensely obvious very quickly. But the top thing is to do well academically, because unfortunately the sets doing public law tend to recruit from the raving overachievers. This is partly because they are so popular, but also because academic ability is so important: you have to grapple with complicated statutes; you have to grasp large amounts of information and assimilate it very quickly, and cope with difficult issues with big implications. I'm afraid I've all but given up on people when they come to me with a 2.2 and say that they want to do public law. Once upon a time, I'd have been really encouraging; now I would say to the majority of them, 'No, I really think you need to rethink the area of law you want to go into or go away and do a lot of work, for instance, at a government department for a few years, because unfortunately, you are not going to make it at this stage."