Steven Thomson

The non-judicial character of ombudsmen is viewed as their greatest asset, offering a more accessible, informal and flexible channel than courts for expressing grievances. Yet the Pensions Ombudsman has objected vigorously to its characterisation in the Chancery Division as ‘not a court’, pointing to a range of judicial qualities with which it has been statutorily invested. This raises the broader question of whether ombudsmen can be courts; a rarely considered characterisation. It is argued in this article that, although some ombudsmen exhibit judicial or quasi-judicial attributes, they are categorically distinct from courts and should remain so. Parliament must be astute not to invest ombudsmen with too many judicial qualities, lest the boundary between exercising judicial functions and exercising the judicial power of the state is crossed. This article also gives cause to reflect more broadly on the fundamental and distinctive nature of courts, tribunals and ombudsmen.

This essay tracks the place of Descartes in Derrida's writing, from ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie’ to the late seminars on the beast and the sovereign. Through a heterodox reading of the Cogito, privileging its negative moment, Derrida's Descartes plays an important role in unsettling narratives of philosophical lineage, as well as complicating deconstruction's relationship with method, and with the questions of mastery which haunt Derrida's later work with particular emphasis. What is at stake is not just the mastery of method, but also the mastery that would be involved in escaping or undoing it. Although the aim is not simply to rescue the honour of Descartes, it is suggested that a response to the problems of mastery cannot go without a certain respect for the complexities and uncertainties of an œuvre that is often too easily discarded as the already-read par excellence.