Stone & Rolls v Moore Stephens [2009] 1 AC 1391 - 'not to be looked at again'

In my book Cases, Causes & Controversies: fifty tales from the law I was critical of some of the undecided issues in the case of Stone & Rolls v Moore Stephens [2009] 1 AC 1391. I warned that the confusion in the judgment might lead to another case going all the way to the Supreme Court, with a lot of costs incurred as a result.  That has now happened, with the Supreme Court recently giving judgment in Jetivia v Bilta [2015] UKSC 23 (read judgment). There was a particular irony in them having to reconsider the case since the leading counsel for the auditors in Stone & Rolls was Jonathan Sumption QC, now Lord Sumption and a judge of the Supreme Court.  One of the dissenting judges in Stone & Rolls was Lord Mance, who was known to have opposed Sumption's appointment to the Supreme Court.  

I would refer readers to a good summary on the UK Human Rights Blog here and to the press summary issued by the Court itself here. In the meantime, I would simply record what Lord Neuberger said at para 30 of the judgment about the Stone & Rolls case: 

"Subject to these points, the time has come in my view for us to hold that the decision in Stone & Rolls should, as Lord Denning MR graphically put it in relation to another case in In re King [1963] Ch 459, 483, be "put on one side and marked 'not to be looked at again'". Without disrespect to the thinking and research that went into the reasoning of the five Law Lords in that case, and although persuasive points and observations may be found from each of the individual opinions, it is not in the interests of the future clarity of the law for it to be treated as authoritative or of assistance save as already indicated."

So it may be that Lords Mance and Sumption can put aside at least some of their differences ... 

Chris Cairns formally charged

According to the NZ Herald, Chris Cairns has now been formally charged.

The article is slightly confused, as it mentions the offence of perverting the course of justice and the offence of perjury.  The two offences are not the same, although from Cairns' point of view it is a distinction without a difference.  Either way his conduct in the libel trial against Lalit Modi is being challenged and thus the credibility of his denials about match fixing is in issue.

Both perjury and perverting the course of justice concern whether or not the process of justice has been obstructed.  Perjury is committed when a person lies under oath, either while giving evidence in court or in sworn statements presented to the court.  Perverting the course of justice can be committed by actions such as hiding or destroying evidence material to a case.

In many trials perjury is technically committed: judgments often state that a witness' evidence was 'not credible', or that the witness was clearly trying to tailor their evidence to suit their side of the case.  Prosecutions do not automatically follow, especially if the evidence was not material to the case or at least the lie did not affect the outcome (say because the witness' side lost the case, or won on grounds independent of the dodgy evidence).

A prosecution is usually only brought where there has been a very serious breach.  Jeffrey Archer's case was a classic example: his entire case was brought on a lie - abusing the very notion of justice, as well as wasting millions of pounds of both public and private money.

Much the same applies to perverting the course of justice: a prosecution would only follow in serious cases.

I would expect therefore that the charges against Cairns will be based on serious allegations.  But it is important to stress - as I have before and will continue to do - that that does not mean they have been proven yet.  Especially where the squalid world of match-fixing is concerned, the truth will always be difficult to ascertain.  Cairns is innocent until proven guilty, and if nothing else, as he himself has stated, at least he now has the chance to defend himself in a proper legal forum, with full disclosure of evidence and cross-examination of all witnesses.

Moreover, although there is no material difference between English law and New Zealand law in this area, it seems to me to be an advantage that the trial is taking place in England, where it is likely none of the jury will have heard of Cairns (unless they are cricket fans).  The story has been reported in England but only on the sports pages.  Thus, Cairns will at least get a fair trial instead of the trial by media he has had to endure for the past few months in New Zealand.

Eweida and others v United Kingdom Part III: some comments

Here is the final part of my article on Strasbourg's four cases this week. 

General observations


What does it mean to have a right to one’s religion? Generally speaking, two things. First, the state should not favour one religion over another. (We in Britain muddle along with an established church, it is true, which may be somewhat intellectually indefensible but falls into the category of Mostly Harmless, and I will leave it aside for now.) Otherwise everyone should be able to worship what they like and where they like within the law, and the law should treat all religions the same, meaning one group should not get state funding or otherwise preferential treatment over others.

Secondly, no-one should be discriminated against because of their religion. In the sphere of criminal law, the state should not impose harsher or lighter sentences because a convicted person happens to belong to a religion. In the employment context, no one should be sacked or disciplined in employment because they believe in X, Y, Z or nothing. It would be outrageous, say, for a bank to state that it will only hire Sikhs and not Hindus or anyone else, and quite properly the latter would have a legal remedy provided by the state via the courts.

We can all agree, I suspect, on that sort of direct discrimination as being plainly wrong. Beyond that agreement is a bit more tricky. My own general approach is set out in Chapter 27 of my book.  Let us now turn to the actual cases, which I have separated into two categories called the symbols cases and the refusal cases respectively.

The symbols cases

Normally it is up to the parties to an employment contract to agree on the terms and then either abide by them or end the contract and pay the other side compensation if the contract is not ended in accordance with its terms. The state’s interest is confined to ensuring that there is no direct discrimination of the sort mentioned above, so that the employer cannot refuse to hire a person because of their gender or race or religion or whatever – and equally so that the employee cannot say (for example) that she will not work in an office with people of a different ethnicity or refuse to serve certain customers for reasons that amount to unlawful discrimination. (The state might also be concerned with health and safety requirements, or a minimum wage, but again those need not concern us here.)

So far as uniform policies or dress codes are concerned, most employers will usually have a policy in place at the start. As long as the existence of the policy is made known to any employee before she signs her contract, and she has a chance to review the terms of the policy and negotiate any exception, it is difficult to see why she should subsequently demand the right to breach the uniform policy in order to display a symbol on religious or cultural or any other ground. The answer is for her to negotiate the agreement from the start. Obviously any sensible employer should not object to inoffensive or unobtrusive items like turbans or crosses, though of course that would not be guaranteed.

This is the approach which Strasbourg has now discarded, having stated (at para [83]):

“Given the importance in a democratic society of freedom of religion, the Court considers that, where an individual complains of a restriction on freedom of religion in the workplace, rather than holding that the possibility of changing job would negate any interference with the right, the better approach would be to weigh that possibility in the overall balance when considering whether or not the restriction was proportionate.”

The problem is that weighing an overall balance may be an interesting and challenging task for academic lawyers, but in many cases it will place a considerable burden on both employers and employees to determine whether any claimed interference with a right is proportionate. Sometimes the answer might be obvious, but there will no doubt be instances where well-meaning employers and employees will face uncertainty – as reflected in the differing outcomes in Eweida and Chaplin’s cases. It is not just employers who suffer when there is uncertainty in the law, but also employees, who would like to know where they stand. And if a dispute results in litigation then both will suffer the attendant cost and stress, whoever wins.

In Chaplin’s case the court decided, quite sensibly, that it could not second-guess the hospital authorities on what was safe and what was not. But what made the court think that it could second-guess BA’s corporate image? Something tells me the judges in Strasbourg have probably not spent very much time running a large multinational company or working in its PR department.

One of the reasons BA came unstuck in Eweida’s case was because it had permitted turbans and head scarfs, so there was a point of consistency between religions. But would it really have been better if it had said no turbans or headscarfs? The only difference with the cross was that it was disputed whether Christianity actually requires it. But neither employers nor courts are in any position to judge what a religion entails on the true construction of its scriptures. We might all agree that it would be reasonable for BA employees to be allowed to wear turbans if they wish, but that is an easy case, and as the old saying goes it is hard cases that make bad law (such as someone demanding to wear an offensive symbol or some bizarre non-religious one).

Maybe, therefore, it comes down to not much more than demanding a liberal dress code, or at the very least a consistent one in which either all symbols are banned or none.

Reverting back to classical contract law once again, it might also be said that Ms Eweida’s breach was so small and insignificant that it would not have caused BA any obvious loss (would a brace of passengers suddenly refused to fly because of the shock of seeing a cross?) and would not have justified terminating the contract. I would have thought it a de minimus breach. Even on a classical contract analysis, however, it would be necessary for the parties to judge what is and what is not a serious breach and that would not be so different from the test about whether a uniform policy complies with art 9.

So it seems there is no easy answer – one way or another we have to end up with someone picking and choosing what religious symbols are reasonable to allow and what are not. Given the inherent problems with such an exercise, there is all the more reason for the parties agreeing terms before one begins, and the courts requiring very good reasons indeed for either party wanting to change them afterwards. In other words, just as the Court allows or should allow a wide margin of appreciation for states, so the states in turn should allow citizens a wide margin of appreciation and presume as a starting point at least that parties should be bound by the terms of contracts they voluntarily conclude. This of course is not all one-sided: as well as protecting employers from employees suddenly making claims years after starting work, it also protects employees from having radical changes of policy foistered on them.

The refusal cases

The refusal cases can be answered more easily. In this context the clash has often been framed as between the right of a person to practice their beliefs, and the right of another person not to be discriminated against in the provision of public services.

It is no surprise that the UK courts and Strasbourg favoured the latter. Imagine for a moment that the employees had proclaimed that their religion prohibited them dealing with Jews or Muslims, or otherwise being seen as “condoning” them. Or imagine if a judge suddenly decided that his religion dictated that a woman’s evidence was of less importance than that of a man. They would have been given a short answer. So would a restaurant which said it was run by the former Dutch Reformed Church and wanted to exclude ethnic minorities as inferior people.

Moreover, the same answer would have been given if the employees had wanted to discriminate in the same way on non-religious grounds.

In Mrs Ladele’s case, there was an argument which appealed to the dissenting judges, namely that she had accepted her job before civil partnerships existed, so the employer should not have been entitled to rewrite her contract by forcing her to preside over them.

There is some cogency to this argument. Assume, however, that someone had been a registrar in the Southern States before the civil rights reforms, when mixed-race marriages were disallowed. Then assume they had run the same argument after the reforms. I doubt any sympathy would lie with someone who refused to perform mixed-race ceremonies due to ‘conscience’.

Epilogue

I have to plead that pressures of time and space preclude as full and thorough a consideration as I would have liked to have attempted. Some other interesting interpretations can be found here, here and here. As to be expected they do not all come to the same conclusions or use the same reasoning, showing how difficult this area of law has perhaps inevitably come. I also enjoy reading this column which regularly considers religion and the law issues, though I frequently disagree with the author’s conclusions.

Meanwhile, here are some thoughts on the hypothetical questions I set out on the first post in this series:

- Sarah the recent alcohol-averse convert should realistically have to end her contract and renegotiate a new one. But her employer Jack would be well advised to consider reassigning her to other duties, assuming that it is practical to do so and no other employees object. In other words he should consider the proportionality of Sarah’s request.

- Mohammed who does not want work on Sundays is out of luck if there is a business justification for it.

- Lucy the environmentalist will hang her case on Nicholson v Grainger, my thoughts on which can be found here.

- Ravi the convert will, like Sarah, have to get around the ruling in Mba.

- Bethan with the crucifix will have a strong case as her situation mirrors Eweida more closely than Chaplin.

- Brian the Judas Priest fan hasn’t got much of a case to say his musical tastes are equivalent to a religion. He snarls that “at least Judas Priest is real” and announces his resignation.

- Jennifer the druid has an interesting point in the light of this story.

- Fatima’s case for not serving homosexuals will certainly (and rightly) fail following on Ladele and McFarlane.

Meanwhile, Jack has given up hiring new staff and so gives Peter the bad news. This is the real point of my extended fable: discussions of rights tend to take place based on the assumption that the only consideration is striking the fair balance between competing human rights. In the real world, unless there are clear and workable rules about employment rights (whether the most fair imaginable or not), employers will not hire new staff, meaning fewer jobs will be created and existing workers will have to shoulder a greater workload each time the business wants to expand. We should not underestimate the importance of certainty in the labour market.

Cases, Causes and Controversies: fifty tales from the law

My book has now been published.  It can be found in Wildy's bookshops in Lincoln's Inn Archway and Fleet St, or on their website here.

Alternatively it can be ordered from Amazon here.

The blurb is as follows:

What do Prince Charles, Bette Davis, Sir Ian Botham, Mrs Victoria Gillick and a man whose family grave appeared in the background of a splatter horror film have in common?


Each of them felt they had been wronged in some way, and each went to court to try and do something about it. Sometimes their case was a purely private argument. Others brought cases of national importance, or claims which raised acute moral and ethical principles. Some won handsomely, while others lost so badly that they ended up far worse than when they started.

This new book looks at fifty legal disputes from Victorian times to the present day, where a compelling moral or legal issue was at stake, or where the background to the case was interesting, amusing or infuriating.

It begins with three Victorian murders, including the law student favourite of R v Dudley and Stephens, the case of shipwrecked sailors eating the cabin boy and later facing trial for his murder.

It then covers cases ranging from the early days of Hollywood and both world wars, through to modern day battles over superinjunctions, MPs’ expenses, the vexed relationship between religion and law, and the sometimes hazy relationship of law and sport.

Some of the stories border on the absurd. Why did the legendarily tough international sportsmen Ian Botham and Allan Lamb show no fear in the face of hostile fast bowling on the pitch, yet go to their lawyers when their old opponent Imran Khan said something they didn’t like in a newspaper?

Irony runs through many of the cases. Bette Davis was left penniless after losing her case in England and felt she had no option but to return to America and resume working for the studio she had unsuccessfully sued. But after doing so she became one of the richest and most and acclaimed actresses in history. In other cases the irony is less happy: the indigenous rights campaigner Eddie Mabo won a great victory for his people, but was shunned by them during his lifetime and never lived to see his final legal victory.

Then there are the outright tragic: the execution of the civilian Charles Fryatt by the Germans during the Great War, for example, shocked not only his own side but neutral observers of the day as well. In modern times, the blameless good citizens Dianne Pretty and Debbie Purdie were stricken with terminal illnesses and were forced to seek legal approval for their desire to end their lives at a time of their own choosing.

Written in a clear, accessible style, free of legal technicalities, the book will be of interest not simply to lawyers but to anyone interested in stories of great human interest and how the legal system tried to deal with them

The Leveson inquiry - the press, the politicians, Parliament, the police and the public

Free speech, in case anyone needed reminding, is one of the cornerstones of our democracy. So it is not just the media who should be interested in the Leveson report and its aftermath. There is no guarantee that the report’s recommendations will find their way into law, but either way they deserve close scrutiny. The Prime Minister has already indicated he does not accept all of the recommendations, and as is well known could not even agree with the deputy Prime Minister enough to make a joint statement, so we can expect to hear a good deal more in the coming months on the relationship between the press, the politicians, Parliament, the police and the public.

One general question concerns the appropriate composition of this sort of inquiry. Here the inquiry was conducted by a single judge. The report explains that it was hoped that the inquiry would proceed on judicial lines, involving the calling of witnesses and the adducing of evidence, followed by factual findings and conclusions. Certainly a judge or senior barrister would be the obvious choice in those circumstances, but the recommendations and conclusions are not at all confined – nor was it ever expected they would be – to forensic findings. It was not simply a matter of which politician and which policeman had done what with which journalist. The ongoing regulation of the press and others cannot be syllogistically extracted from a set of factual findings about what they have done in the past. Rather, we are into the realm of principle in determining proper limits of free speech, and also the realm of pragmatism in how those limits might be best enforced.

For that reason, for all his undoubted experience of the media reporting litigation over the years, Lord Justice Leveson would, I venture to suggest, have been assisted by others along the lines of a Fleet St grandee and perhaps some retired police and politicians. If it was too difficult to find someone with expertise who was fully independent of any remaining interests in this country, then perhaps assistance could have been found from elsewhere in the Commonwealth.

By way of comparison, in my book I criticise the Chilcott inquiry into the Iraq war for having no lawyers at all and thus no-one experienced in cross-examination. Appropriately there was military expertise on that inquiry but the conduct – and cross-examination of witnesses – would have been enhanced by counsel being added as well. In other words, a better composition could have been found with both Chilcott and Leveson.

Another prior question regarding the Leveson report is whether there was a need for an inquiry at all. The casus belli was the apparent hacking of the mobile phone of the murdered teenager Milly Dowler, but the story turned out not to have been true. Leveson states in forthright fashion that an inquiry was still justified because of ongoing concern about the place of the press. But it does not follow from bad behaviour of the press with other parties that it is the former and not the latter who should be regulated in future.

For example, where the press have been shown to have entered into inappropriate relations with the police, then the answer is tighter controls of police. A police officer leaking information about an inquiry is (potentially) committing a criminal offence. Indeed, the journalist might too if he or she acted in a way that prejudiced a trial. There might also be a civil remedy arising from breaches of the right to privacy, having regard to Art 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The same applies with politicians and civil servants: if they are too close to journalists, or are found leaking information improperly, then they may breach codes of conduct for their respective roles or, again, face both civil and criminal proceedings depending on the circumstances.

In other words, the answer to many of the questions posed by Leveson may well be better enforcement of the existing law, not new laws or new enforcement mechanisms.

The most controversial suggestion in Leveson comes from his suggestion of a statutorily-underpinned but still “independent” regulator. Some reaction has been frankly naïf: one blog suggested the only statute should be an almost verbatim reproduction of the US First Amendment. This is absurd for the simple and trite reason that short of complete anarchy there will always be restrictions on free speech.

That does not mean, however, that a statutory regulator – a stronger restriction in theory than ad hoc laws protecting such things as privacy, state secrets and intellectual property – is necessary or desirable. An independent regulator “underpinned” by statute looks like a statutory regulator at one remove, if not a statutory regulator by any other name.

Leveson conceded that much of the wrongdoing with which he was concerned was already unlawful or, in some cases, illegal, but then suggested an arbitration process which parties would be compelled to follow on pain of not receiving costs in the High Court even if they won. The justification for such a process is the usual objection to litigation of it being too slow and too expensive for the general public. But that applies to all litigation, and it is not clear at all why some form of exemption should be carved out in one area of law and not others.

Secondly, arbitration proceedings are usually confidential, because they constitute a process chosen by parties to a commercial contract as part of their private bargain. The resolution of any disputes arising out of those private affairs is (generally speaking) no-one else’s business. With the press printing stories about individuals without the latter’s consent, any resultant dispute is not part of a consensual bargain. Moreover, there may be a public interest in the proceedings and their outcome which is not present in commercial bargains, so the justification for confidentiality will be much weaker.

Further, commercial arbitration in London is done under the purview of a long-established system of commercial law. By contrast, the law of privacy and the press is in a state of flux. Arbitration proceedings have no precedent value and so will not develop the law at all.

The final point is the elephant that was in the room throughout the Leveson inquiry, in the form of the internet. As I have written before (see Cases, Causes & Controversies: fifty tales from the law (Wildy, Simmons & Hill, 2012), p 151):

… the reality is that since the law (for present purposes) has no reach beyond these shores, it has become – for better or for worse – very much harder indeed to suppress information than ever before. Someone outside the jurisdiction might publish something on the internet that would then be easily accessible to British citizens. It would still be an offence for a British citizen to download and disseminate the information, but readers will need no elaboration of the reality of such a situation.

The only recourse for the government in those circumstances would be to try and censor internet search engines, in the manner of a few largely non-admirable totalitarian regimes elsewhere. I trust such a step is not likely to occur in this country ...

Only today we have seen what modern communications enable overseas media to do, and there is nothing whatsoever that any British statutory body could do about it ..

J'Accuse - the Dreyfus affair then and now

I have been published in this week's New Law Journal, vol 162, 16 November 2012, p 1434 (£), on the Dreyfus affair.

Zombies in the High Court

I have been published in this week's New Law Journal, on the suit against Peter Jackson over his Splatter Horror film "Brain Dead" (released in some countries as "Dead Alive".

MPs expenses

The issue of MPs’ expenses is back in the news. It seems that MPs have experienced much and learned little: the system is still being used as a cash cow, and they are still trying to keep the whole thing quiet.

According to the Telegraph:

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) reversed its decision to publish information about MPs’ landlords today, after the Speaker of the House of Commons ordered the regulator to keep the information private for “security” reasons.

It is feared that several MPs may be exploiting a loophole in the rules that allows politicians to rent their homes to one another.

This means that MPs can still effectively build up property nest eggs at taxpayers’ expense, despite official attempts to stop the practice following the expenses scandal.

More details have followed since.

Both the amount of money MPs are paid and the method of payment – salary, bonus, expenses – are essentially political questions. They are however of legal interest in two respects. The first is the obvious question of whether expense claims are lawful; that is to say, whether they are within the rules. Various extremely high profile criminal prosecutions were made under the old regime, following determination of the prior question whether the courts or Parliament itself had jurisdiction over the matter. I wrote about this for Criminal Law & Justice Weekly (vol 175, 5 February 2011, p 73).

The second question is the rather more general point about the wrong approach to making law. In my forthcoming book (details on the sidebar in this blog) I have written about R v Chaytor and suggested something on the following lines:

The fundamental flaw is that any system which operates by people making claims and then hoping to get them approved, but with no restriction on the amount that might be claimed or penalty for having a number of claims refused, gives every encouragement to people to keep on shoving in claim after claim for anything and everything. Any rational, profit-maximising individual would do nothing else.

There are many alternatives. For example, MPs could simply have a fixed sum added to their salaries, to be spent on support staff, travelling expenses or whatever, but no more. Then – in sharp contrast with the present system – they would have every incentive to economise.

All the talk in the original controversy about needing second homes and travel expenses was predicated on the assumption that MPs actually needed to be in any particular physical place at any particular time. In the age of smartphones, videoconferencing and unlimited broadband access, however, that assumption is very hard to justify.

However, let us assume that it is indeed desirable for MPs to be physically present in the Houses of Parliament. Let us also assume that it would be unfair for MPs outside the M25 to be saddled with the extra costs of travelling to and staying in London. Then, one could build a hall of residence for those MPs (with a grander name if one prefers). It could be a modern, furnished and serviced apartment block next to the Palace of Westminster. It would cost a tiny fraction of the amount spent on second homes, the security costs would be far lower as there would only be one building to protect, and MPs would have no more and no less than they needed.

No doubt MPs would feel demeaned by this. But they might consider that a number of large city law firms have dormitories on their premises, together with a few ancillary services such as a canteen and laundry service. These are provided for partners working overtime on large deals. If the apartment block was within walking distance from the Houses of Parliament, (perhaps with an underground tunnel to reduce security costs and provide disabled access) it would slash travelling expenses as well.

This would go a long way towards restoring public confidence in MPs and Parliament generally. One fears though that a majority of MPs will still prefer to play the property market at the taxpayer’s expense and either withhold details from the public or take the loss of popularity on the chin.

Unless the above suggestion or a similarly radical reform is instigated, public confidence in Parliament will continue to be threatened. Needless to say, it is not only lawyers who should be concerned by that.

A deadly secret

Published in the New Law Journal, vol 162, 28 September 2012, p 1230

New Zealand, like the United Kingdom, has a fairly comprehensive national health system, although the system does not share the same name and is in some respects perhaps not as comprehensive. Being a far smaller community the opportunities and resources for medical specialisation are necessarily fewer, for example. Nevertheless, it has long been the expectation of New Zealanders that they will receive health care on the basis of need, not ability to pay. Any identifiable exceptions to that rule over the years have always generated strident public debate.


So it was in the mid-1980s, when the government decided it would no longer pay for heart transplants in New Zealand hospitals. Instead, grants would be made available for patients to have the operations performed in Australia. To say that the measure was controversial would be an understatement. It certainly would have come as a painful shock to one Mr Tucker, a patient on the transplant waiting list at the time.

Worse was to follow for Mr Tucker. The grant subsequently offered by the government was nowhere near enough to pay for the necessary treatment in Sydney. Sympathetic newspapers picked up his plight and a national fundraising campaign was held. The campaign appeared to be successful and he travelled to Australia to await his operation.

In the meantime, however, the rumour mill had been fed some grist. It turned out that Mr Tucker had an unsavoury past, having served time in jail for indecent assault. Unsurprisingly, public sympathy for his plight started to evaporate, along with some of the promised funds for his operation.

With his life now imperilled, both by the lack of funds for the operation and the extra stress brought on by the adverse publicity, Mr Tucker applied to the High Court for an injunction restraining further publication of his past convictions.   Continue reading here.

Cases, Causes and Controversies: Fifty Tales from the Law

I have a new book with the above title being published in November, which may be pre-ordered here.  Several of the chapters have been foreshadowed in blogs on this site and elsewhere.  The blurb is as follows:

What do Prince Charles, Bette Davis, Sir Ian Botham, Mrs Victoria Gillick and a man whose family grave appeared in the background of a splatter horror film have in common?


Each of them felt they had been wronged in some way, and each went to court to try and do something about it. Sometimes their case was a purely private argument. Others brought cases of national importance, or claims which raised acute moral and ethical principles. Some won handsomely, while others lost so badly that they ended up far worse than when they started.

This new book looks at fifty legal disputes from Victorian times to the present day, where a compelling moral or legal issue was at stake, or where the background to the case was interesting, amusing or infuriating.

It begins with three Victorian murders, including the law student favourite of R v Dudley and Stephens, the case of shipwrecked sailors eating the cabin boy and later facing trial for his murder.

It then covers cases ranging from the early days of Hollywood and both world wars, through to modern day battles over superinjunctions, MPs’ expenses, the vexed relationship between religion and law, and the sometimes hazy relationship of law and sport.

Some of the stories are border on the absurd. Why did the legendarily tough international sportsmen Ian Botham and Allan Lamb show no fear in the face of hostile fast bowling on the pitch, yet go crying to their lawyers when their old opponent Imran Khan said something they didn’t like in a newspaper?

Irony runs through many of the cases. Bette Davis was left penniless after losing her case in England and felt she had no option but to return to America and resume working for the studio she had unsuccessfully sued. But after doing so she became one of the richest and most and acclaimed actresses in history. In other cases the irony is less happy: the indigenous rights campaigner Eddie Mabo won a great victory for his people, but was shunned by them during his lifetime and never lived to see his final legal victory.

Then there are the outright tragic: the murder of the civilian Charles Fryatt by the Germans during the Great War, for example, shocked not only his own side but neutral observers of the day as well. In modern times, the blameless good citizens Dianne Pretty and Debbie Purdie were stricken with terminal illnesses and were forced to seek legal approval for their desire to end their lives at a time of their own choosing.

Written in a clear, accessible style, free of legal technicalities, the book will be of interest not simply to lawyers but to anyone interested in stories of great human interest and how the legal system tried to deal with them.

The book is published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill, with thanks to LexisNexis.