Sue and I first met in 1984 in a place called the Wrong Horse, a sort of left wing night club that ran in the basement of a pub in Tufnell Park in North London. Some of you may remember it.

The wonderful thing about the Wrong Horse during the short time it ran was that one's social life was immensely speeded up because virtually the entire milieu of radical North London was all together once a week.

It was in this context that I met Sue. I still remember asking "What do you do then?" To which she replied without a moment's hesitation, and a huge grin: "I'm doing research into male sexuality." For an unreconstructed bloke like me this was probably not the best opening. But something clicked.

But this was characteristic of Sue. She was not afraid to say who she was and what she was about. She had boundless reserves of chutzpah. And these served her very well in the later years in which she devoted herself to the reform of the way that the criminal justice system dealt with the questions of rape and domestic violence.

I remember the trepidation I used to feel when she set out, with her battered briefcase, her one and only smart suit, and frequently odd socks, to berate gatherings of magistrates, sheriffs, judges, senior police officers and such like on the way the criminal justice system effectively decriminalised sexual violence.

I used to think: these people are mad, they won't listen to you; they'll have you for breakfast. But in fact it was the other way around: she had them for breakfast and in the process met more than a few co-thinkers and sympathisers in the ranks of lawyers and criminal justice professionals.

I guess the most public display of her coolness and unflappability under fire was her appearance on the Ali-G Show: an experience for which all those meetings with magistrates and police officers must have been good practice!

The second quality that Sue had which enabled her to function as a public intellectual was the ability to tread the fine line between, on the one hand, commitment and polemic and, on the other, scholarly rigour.

In polemical encounters she always deployed her rigour and scholarship to good effect. She certainly got into many such situations: on radio phone-in programmes, on BBC Woman's Hour, in the newspaper columns and on television.

The encounter I remember best was when one of the excellent Dispatches programmes she made with Lynn Ferguson for Channel Four on the treatment of domestic violence victims was challenged by someone. Lynn and Sue had to appear on the programme Right to Reply to respond to criticisms. Sue was able to calmly rebut the criticisms by explaining exactly how the research for the programme had been conducted; what could be concluded from it and what could not.

On the other hand her academic work was passionately committed to campaigning for social change. Not for her the dry anodyne research report, written in such a careful language as to offend no-one and therefore to say little, and which begins to gather dust even before it has left the printers.

She understood that the truth of what you are arguing is not guaranteed in advance by following, for example, the currently fashionable theoretical terminology or research methods, but by the process of criticism and debate in the public sphere.

Thus her research was both rigorous--no one sat through more rape trials and poured over more trial transcripts than she did--and informed by political clarity about the intolerable nature of the existing state of affairs and the need for change. It was written in a style accessible to anyone. For this reason her books will be studied and argued about long after other material has been filed away in the basement of research libraries.

Finally, a back-handed compliment to the impact she had which I'll never forget. We were, I think, at her late father's 90th birthday celebrations. He was tremendously proud of his youngest daughter's achievements. There we were, sipping champagne and munching canapes, when an elderly gentleman approached Sue and said: "I understand, my dear, that you've just written an excoriating book on the judiciary." Later we were informed, though perhaps it was a wind-up, that he was a retired High Court Judge. Even if he wasn't, he certainly seemed to have the qualities suitable for such high office.

I said to Sue: "You've only just finished it (Carnal Knowledge) and you've provoked panic in the ranks of the ruling class!" She said: "Yes, that's given me an idea for my next book. I'll call it 'Time to Judge the Judges' ". This was indeed the working title of the book she was beginning to get down to when...

Well, you know the rest.