The law's all too lordly way of defying its critics During his long career as a political campaigner, Peter Hain can seldom have found such a coalition united behind him. The decision by John Larkin, the Attorney General of Northern Ireland, to prosecute Mr Hain for "unwarranted abuse of a judge" - a near-extinct 18th-century offence - over remarks in his autobiography about Lord Justice Paul Girvan has produced an outpouring of support for the former Northern Ireland Secretary. David Cameron has condemned the decision. The justice minister in Belfast laments the waste of public money. A host of MPs have signed a Commons motion condemning the move. No wonder, when Mr Larkin is putting such a high price on Lord Justice Girvan's dignity: if Mr Hain is acquitted, the state will have to pick up legal costs expected to amount to £300,000. There are two equally worrying trends on display here. The first is the increasingly liberal use of public money by public figures to protect their reputations. There was widespread disquiet when one of John Bercow's first acts as Speaker was to appoint a former journalist as his personal PR man, on a six-figure salary. His predecessor, Michael Martin, hired the law firm Carter-Ruck to face down his critics. They are not alone. A 1993 court decision known as the Derbyshire judgment ruled that public bodies may not sue for libel - but as the campaign group Index on Censorship recently warned, an increasing number of public servants (especially in local authorities) are circumventing this by suing as individuals, with their employer picking up the costs. The second trend is equally alarming: the growing arrogance of the judiciary, and its tendency to resent any criticism, especially from outside the profession. Consider the response of Sir Nicolas Bratza, the president of the European Court of Human Rights, to David Cameron's efforts to reform his institution. First, Sir Nicolas pre-emptively rubbished the speech in which the Prime Minister set out his reforms. Then, after last week's Council of Europe conference in Brighton, he loftily warned that "we are, I have to say, uncomfortable with the idea that one sometimes finds that governments can in some way dictate to the Court how its case law should evolve or how it should carry out the judicial functions conferred on it." What Sir Nicholas - and, it appears, Mr Larkin - fail to grasp is that authority is only respected if it has legitimacy. By behaving in such a high-handed, unaccountable manner, whether by failing to engage with their critics or by wasting thousands of pounds of public money to take them to court, they bring the institutions they represent into disrepute. We urge them to show a little more humility, and a lot more sense.