Lawyering – Page 2

Lord Denning Cuts The Crap

Lord Denning begins his judgment in Buttes Gas and Oil Co v Hammer and others [1980] 3 All ER 475 with this:

“Abu Musa is a small island in the Arabian Gulf. Early in 1970 oil was discovered nine miles off its shore. Each of two American oil companies claimed the right to exploit it. They started litigating about it in October 1970. Now ten years later the action is nowhere near trial. It has only reached the stage of discovery of documents. On this interlocutory point the argument before us took nine days, with five leading counsel and as many juniors. We have had excursions into the law of the sea, of territorial waters and the continental shelf, into sovereign immunity and diplomatic immunity, into the rules of court and goodness knows what else. No expense has been spared. No stone left unturned. McNeill J in the court below exploded. Even at that stage, when the application was before him, he said that the length of the proceedings was ‘outrageous and comes perilously near to an abuse of the process of the court’. Even more when it reaches us nearly a year later. Still we must go on with it. It looks like outdoing Jarndyce v Jarndyce (see Dickens, Bleak House) except that these litigants are not likely to run out of money.”

And ends with this:

“I return to where I started. This is merely an application for discovery of documents. Yet it has taken the master, the judge and the Court of Appeal many days of argument and many pages of judgments. All the territorial matters under discussion have passed into history. They were settled by international agreement eight years ago. The continental shelf of the Arabian Gulf has been apportioned out. The oil revenues have been divided by agreement. All that is left is this interminable action arising out of a speech by Dr Armand Hammer on 5 October 1970 at the Great Eastern Hotel in London. It is high time to let bygones be bygones. I would not allow any further discovery by either side. Let these two oil companies fight it out as best they can with such materials as they have available or can get hold of. By subpoena or otherwise. There is quite enough of it in all conscience. Take out a summons for directions. Either side can demand that it be tried by a jury. I pity the jury. Set the action down for trial at once. Let it hang about no longer. For goodness sake get rid of it one way or the other.”

Lord Denning rOxOrs so hard sometimes.

Marrrrrritime Law

One of the other lawyers was teaching me how to research a ship.

Lawyer X: Okay, so if you can’t find it in Lloyd’s Register or the online sources, that probably means it’s –
Me: PIRATES!
Lawyer X, looking at me strangely: – not a vessel involved in international trade.
Me: Ah, yes.

I think I need to curb my enthusiasm a bit more.

How Dare They

What a week. Lots of stuff I wanted to write about got swallowed up in the demands of the professional legal course I’m on, where it seems they are starting to want us to, like, learn actual stuff about being a legal professional. How outrageous. The entries that follow are my attempt at catch-up.

Goodbye Mr Stephens

Mr Jim Stephens was my lecturer and tutor in criminal law in my second year at UCL. Two years later, he would still smile and say hello whenever we happened to meet on the streets of Bloomsbury, or in the corridors of the law faculty. This would perhaps be understandable if I had been a good student of criminal law, but I wasn’t. Through no fault of his, I missed at least a third of the lectures, and was usually woefully unprepared for tutorials. But even though I certainly entered the doors of his room with very little in my mind, I always left with much more.

He bewildered and frustrated us at first. The robustness that cut through the dead air of lecture theatres and kept even sleepy me awake as he snarled “Hey, FATTY!” in lectures on provocation was almost too much to handle in his faculty room, where each of us in turn would be hemming and hawing at the end of his penetrating gaze as we racked our brains for the answer he was looking for. He insisted on a highly systematic approach to dissecting the many different elements of a problem question, and in my conceptual haziness I chafed as what I thought were reasonable answers were often not considered precise enough. Over time though, things got clearer, and everything started to make sense. I believe his rigour in those tutorials was behind my eventual First in criminal law.

It would be inaccurate to frame this post as a goodbye to a beloved teacher. The nature of my university life was that I engaged with my teachers as little as humanly possible, because I was acutely aware that I was quite possibly their laziest student, and if they didn’t already know that, I didn’t want them to find out. But when I heard the news today, memories of Mr Stephens were easy to find, easier to find than memories of most of the people who have only just lectured me in NUS. I remember a clear blue gaze, a ready smile, and pavement conversations where he seemed genuinely interested in what and how I was doing, and all this for a student who faltered on questions like “What is the leading case in defining recklessness?”

The next time I am in London, Bloomsbury, and the corridors of the UCL law faculty, will feel a little emptier.

Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK

Handy coincidence. I was sitting here trying to think of a way to start this entry, and was looking through my CDs to choose one to play, and hey presto.

So anyway, this entry will be all about how I had a tough exam yesterday, and then had to leave straight after it to go to uni to do a simulated arbitration which I had done zero preparation for and could therefore have really sucked at, and how the day could have gone really badly, but it didn’t at all, and I’m happy. If all that sounds boring to you, that’s probably because it is. Go read The Onion if you’d rather. Otherwise, read on.

—

Waking up was agony. I used to have to stay up the whole night before most of my O’level prelims, given that I only tended to start studying the entire year’s work at 3 or 4 that afternoon. In the first year of uni, I remember a delirious conversation around 5 am with Esther the morning of the property law exam, trying to work out what the fuck the case Re Vandervell was all about. Those days seem to be gone. Yesterday, I’d stayed up cramming till 4, and woke up at 9 feeling like I’d been hit by a bus.

Sitting jittery outside the exam room hoping that the questions really really wouldn’t require a sound understanding of hedging or forward markets (i.e. the introductory chapter I didn’t understand) or, actually, international trade law at all (i.e. the entire course), that familiar old internal refrain of “In all fairness, Michelle, you don’t really deserve to pass this exam anyway, given this sort of preparation” was seeming as pertinent as ever.

But then the lovely old retiree who’s been invigilating these exams handed me the question paper and oh joy, oh providence, there were questions I could do, although forgetting all my cases couldn’t have helped, and I think I might just have gotten away with this.

I left jubilant, grabbed a coffee, and got on the bus to uni. Prepared doggedly for the arbitration over the next hour or so, fuelled only by a char siew pau and fear of humiliation, and managed to deliver a credible performance despite being mentally dead and feeling somewhat intimidated by the formidable abilities of everyone else. After class, the professor took us all for a drink. I swigged a strangely headless Guinness, got to know my rather personable and engaging coursemates a little better, and generally had a grand time.

—

Today, in contrast, has been sedate. Woke up in time for lunch. For dessert my mum whipped out a gargantuan tub of chin chow (grass jelly, it’s much nicer than it sounds), and I gorged myself happily. Lazed on the couch. The Discovery travel channel was featuring the World’s Top Ten Seductive Beach Resorts, all of which looked samey and artificial. After a while I got tired of seeing gooey-eyed couples embracing in the sunset, mostly because of my current geographic inability to do the same.

Channel surfing revealed a Hallmark movie featuring an inordinate number of grizzled old men in flat caps and tweed gathered on a rugged beach for a horse and buggy race. It was immediately obvious to me where this movie was set even before anyone opened their mouth and sounded lilting, and the appearance of the prosthetic-eared leprechauns confirmed my suspicions. So anyway this touching love story unfolded between an American, who of course had gone to Ireland to find his roots, and a sassy Irish woman, and there was, like, this PARALLEL love story between a fairy and a leprechaun, and obviously the uniting factor between both love stories was that they come from DIFFERENT WORLDS, and there are all these OBSTACLES to their love, but of course their love TRIUMPHS over all, because doesn’t it always, and at some point I fell asleep.

Blip

Forgive me. I generally try avoid meaningless blog entries, and I promise I do have an entry about the last few days in the works, but I have just woken up from a bizarre, neither-sleep-nor-waking-dream at my library desk to find I have typed “Effect on the contract of carriage of the carrier deciding to stow the cargo on deck without first obtaininggggg beanbag ffor my room, but is there a spare kayak?” into my notes.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the law of carriage of goods by sea is boring.

Fun With US Constitutional Case Names!

Fun fact for the day: in the American constitutional rights saga that began with the miraculous “creation” of a general right to privacy and eventually led to the legalizing of abortion, a case along the way that extended this right of privacy to activities relating to marriage was called Loving v. Virginia.

Okay, so maybe it’s a thoroughly boring factoid and would amuse only the puerile, but when trying to research a comparative human rights essay on judicial discovery of unenumerated rights, one must look for these little joys.

Distracted By Jesus

While ploughing through back issues of The Irish Jurist I was completely diverted from my quest for articles on unenumerated rights in Irish constitutional law (no prizes for guessing that Comparative Human Rights is my “fun but impractical” Masters course choice) by “The Trial Of Jesus As A Conflict Of Laws?” (1997 32 Ir. Jur. 398 for any similarly sad lawyer type who’s interested).

It tackles the three main areas of concern in the subject: jurisdiction, choice of law and enforcement of judgments, basically: who had the jurisdiction to put Jesus on trial, Pilate (as Roman governor of Judea), Herod (as tetrach of Galilee and a client-king of Rome), or the Sanhedrin (as highest Jewish court of law)? What law would be applied in the trial, Roman or Jewish? Lastly, if in answer to the first two questions we discover that the Sanhedrin decided, applying Jewish law, would Pilate be prepared or required to enforce the judgment?

It ultimately concludes that there was only one trial, before Pilate, who applied Roman law, which seemed a sensible if not revelatory stance, but it was a refreshing diversion none the less.

Dear Wankers

To certain unnamed but now viciously described users of the law library where I unfortunately spend my postgraduate days:

German guy with overly floppy hair and a weak face that somehow looks capable of cruelty (think Rolf from The Sound Of Music), you are not the life of the library party, and your need to let the whole room know you’re having a wonderfully entertaining conversation is really pathetic. Your lavender jumpers really don’t go with blindingly blond hair. Also, not only is eating in a library a bit out of order, eating loud food (apples, crisps) and punctuating your already loud conversations with crunches and lipsmacks truly takes the cake, pun not intended.

Girl who hangs adoringly around German guy, and has an accent distinctly from my part of the world (Singapore or Malaysia), you are obviously so blinded by his hair that you have forgotten the manners and library etiquette they most certainly teach us back home. Thankfully, you’re trying too hard to act demure and cute to add to his noise.

Thirtysomething-if-you’re-a-day woman who leisurely answers unsilenced mobile phone and jabbers away at top volume for prolonged conversations, I have no idea what planet you’re from, so I’m not even going to bother.

With utmost sincerity,
A fellow library user, who is hardly encouraged in researching her human rights essay by the fact that she keeps longing to bludgeon all of you to death, or at least chuck you in gulags.

[Just to clarify: the library I refer to in this post is not the UCL library where I was amused by graffitti. That one is largely populated by undergraduates, who may burble on a bit at times about how rat-arsed they got last Friday night, but generally focus their efforts on vandalism and falling asleep, which are silent preoccupations and therefore don’t annoy me. The one I use most of the time, and which I refer to in this post, is only for postgrads, academics and professionals, all of whom really should know better.]