In many ways the aetiology of this work stems back to over 40 years ago when I first began to study the House of Lords as a judicial body as a DPhil student at Oxford. Anyone who is familiar with the publication to emerge from that research, The Law Lords (Macmillan, 1982), will recognise that this work draws in part on material taken from that book (for which I gratefully acknowledge the permission of Palgrave Macmillan), as well as examining similar issues. In 2008, prompted by the impending demise of the House of Lords and its replacement by the new Supreme Court in October 2009, and fortified by the generous support of the Nuffield Foundation (a charitable trust that funds research and innovation in social policy), I returned to my original task of describing, analysing and explaining in terms which are hopefully intelligible to lawyers and laypersons alike, how appellate judicial decision-making in the United Kingdom’s top court works. I was intending to draw comparisons between the final years of the judicial House of Lords, which had been largely dominated by Lord Bingham, and the court presided over by his great predecessor as senior Law Lord, Lord Reid, which I had studied in the 1970s. As before, the fieldwork lasted far longer than anticipated, in part because of the huge responsiveness of those whom I approached for interviews this time round. As a result the working title for the project—the Last Law Lords—had to be abandoned when it became clear that despite not interviewing nearly as many counsel as in the first project, I was going to end up with many more judicial interviews. As my publishers wisely advised, a work which emerged several years after the establishment of the Supreme Court would not only be slighted dated, it would miss the wonderful opportunity of comparing the House of Lords with the early years of the Supreme Court. Accordingly, I commenced further interviews with the early Justices of the Supreme Court and with the generous assistance of the Leverhulme Trust (which funds research and education), which provided a Fellowship for 18 months, I was enabled to complete the fieldwork (including, for the first time, the scrutiny of judicial notebooks from the top Court) and the bulk of the writing up in 2012–2013.