Book review: Adult Social Care Law (Second Edition)

• Author: Stephen Knafler QC
• Publisher: Legal Action Group
• ISBN: 978-1912273331
• Pages: 1,520
• RRP: £75

A little less than half way through the second edition of Adult Social Care Law, Stephen Knafler QC writes: ‘This is only a textbook’. That is partly true, but it is also a force of nature. It is an undertaking which has been performed with such obvious attention to detail, that the resulting tome is so vast as to almost have its own gravitational field. On his Landmark Chambers webpage, Mr Knafler QC is described by one client as having ‘a brain the size of a planet’. That may indeed be true, because he (aided by a team of contributors from Landmark Chambers and Garden Court Chambers) has authored a book the size of a small moon.

Context matters

In the introduction to the first edition, Mr Knafler QC explains the struggle to determine what his brief should be: he felt that a ‘full-scale textbook’ was too monumental a task (perhaps partly in deference to those who had attempted