Processing Cases

I wonder what people think of justice when they meet it for the first time; perhaps it would be more accurate to use “the legal process” instead of justice, because judges of most kinds seem to be intent on processing their work as a matter of priority; processing cases is important, but it is only worthwhile if it done justly, and so much is not done justly these days; perhaps it was always thus. 

I despair when so much judicial time is wasted on process, instead on being devoted to seeing justice done.

Beyond Satire

The world is rapidly becoming a place where governments and officials enforce the letter of the law, rather than the spirit of the law. This is oppressive.

Human Rights Rule the Common Law

I have spent much of my life in courts and seen how the law works in criminal and (mostly) civil cases. I have watched judges make good decisions and bad decisions, and served on a jury which impressed me with the desire of every member to come to the right decision, taking great care and trouble and using all of our ordinary skills and experience of life. The law is an odd taskmaster.

The Complexity of Law

The law has always been a complex area of human activity. It is easy to state principles, such as the Ten Commandments, but the practical application of those principles is complex, because human activity is complex and humans have an ability to do new things or old things in a new way and laws must protect and control society from good and bad developments in human behaviour. Thus there are tens of thousands of words written about the interpretation of the Ten Commandments, and millions of words written in the statute books and in legal judgments that create precedents.

Perhaps the wheels of justice are beginning to grind the bankers.

Running a business which is shielded by the concept of liability being limited, not to its members, but to the capital that the members have contributed brings great privileges, because the members of the business have limited their risk and in doing so expose potential creditors to risk. If you operate a business as a human or in partnerships with other humans, you risk every last asset you own if things go wrong. If you operate through a corporation, you run no personal risk, unless you have misbehaved or acted illegally. However, you may think, that no one can be forced to provide credit to a limited liability company, but in some field of business people are cajoled, enticed and often required to provide credit and have no option but so to do. This is most apparent in the banking sector.

There are plenty of laws against it

The law is getting very complicated. In the past fifty years procedures have changed, many new laws have been enacted and we seem to be moving away from the principle that everything is permitted unless it is specifically prohibited to a principle that everything is prohibited unless it is permitted.

Law is important because it governs us, far more than our government. Some of the complexity of law is inevitable as society itself because more complex. Some of the complexity of the law is unnecessary.

It is hard for someone who has not studied the law to understand it; ignorance of the law is no excuse. “I did not know it was against the law” has always been no defence, but now, increasingly “there is no law against it” is no longer a defence in many cases.

Immunity from Prosecution?

If I turned up on your doorstep and told you lies to persuade you to sign a contract, and you believed the lies and signed the contract and subsequently it turned out that you could prove quite easily that I had lied to you and I had deceived you, you might think that I had committed some criminal offence. Indeed, I would have committed the offence of fraud under the Fraud Act. All the prosecution need to prove that I was dishonest, that I intended to make a gain and that I made a false or misleading misrepresentation.  I could easily be shown to have an intention of misleading you, because it must have been clear that I knew I was telling you a pack of lies when I got you to sign the contract.

For some reason which I cannot understand the Fraud Act is not being applied to energy companies.

Reasonableness and Proportionality

The law of England and Wales developed a concept of reasonableness; the law is usually blind to the sex of people and the phrase “the reasonable man” has a better ring to it than “the reasonable person”. In any event, the Interpretation Act deemed men women and vice versa for the purposes of statute law. Having developed a concept of the reasonable man, much of law turned on what a reasonable man would do or think or how a reasonable man would react.

Experts and Trials

Looking at things very carefully and for very long periods of time is the mark of an expert, a specialist in the things which are being studied. It can provide very useful science and very useful information. So much so that in almost every field of human endeavour the expert rules. Governments and large corporations hire experts to tell them what to do. It is an unusual government or corporation that will not follow the expert advice. In that sense experts become the decision makers, not the elected government or the elected board of directors. Presumably an expert would give the same advice regardless of which elected government employed him or her, and the expert would give the same advice regardless of which company or board of directors employed her or him.

Chris Huhne sowed the seeds of his own destruction

Almost no criminal commits a crime thinking that he or she would be caught. If one was to stop and imagine the certainty of being caught and consequences of being caught and punished for a crime before it is committed then I imagine there would be very little crime. Crime is encouraged by the lack of certainty of being caught.