History and Law: The Essence is the Same: Jonathan Sumption, Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom

As someone who writes about the history of civilization from an evidentiary standpoint, I am gratified to have found an allied voice in the sometimes vast wasteland of scholarship:

“The essence of law is to strip away the vast proportion of facts and what you’re left with usually supplies the answer. History is exactly the same.”

- Jonathan Sumption (just appointed to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, author of a "narrative history of the hundred years’ war, so far numbering three volumes, [which] has been praised as “a masterpiece” by Frederic Raphael and “an enterprise on a truly Victorian scale” by Allan Massie")

This gift of reducing things to their essence is sometimes not shared by people in the humanities, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and related historical professions such as Egyptology, Assyriology and Biblical scholarship and is one reason why those fields are marked in part by pervasive and colossal mainstream errors that still need to be corrected down the road.