“Novelty pig calendars and toys have been banned from a council office — in case they offend Muslim staff. Workers in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, were told to remove or cover up all pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.” (“Muslims win toy pigs ban”, The Sun, recent undated; Mark Steyn, “Making a pig’s ear of defending democracy”, DailyTelegraph, Oct. 4; Bookworm Room, Oct. 4). And: “Prison staff have been told to stop wearing Cross of St George tiepins because they could be ‘misinterpreted” as a racist symbol. Anne Owers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, was ‘concerned” to see a number of officers at Wakefield jail in Yorkshire wearing the tiepins, apparently in support of a cancer charity.” The Cross of St. George is the English national flag. (Philip Johnston, “Prison bans Cross of St George tiepins”, Daily Telegraph, Oct. 4).
Posts Tagged ‘United Kingdom’
Book review in today’s WSJ
I’m in today’s Wall Street Journal (sub – $) with a generally favorable review of Sadakat Kadri’s new book “The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson“. A few excerpts from the review:
By 1880 the criminal trial as an institution had become standardized around the West to the point that readers on many continents found little that was unfamiliar in Dostoevsky’s account of the murder proceedings against Dmitri Karamazov. The lawyers popping up with objections, the witness box and table of evidentiary exhibits, the sensation-seekers filling the gallery — all were as common to the courthouses of San Francisco or Paris as to those of late-czarist Russia. Go back a few centuries to premodern Europe, though, and the forms of justice can seem to our eyes indescribably strange: trial by ordeal, by combat or by compurgation (the collecting of oaths from supporters) and so forth.
And yet the march of progress is not always quite so apparent. We may smile at the premodern practice of putting a pig or haystack on trial for having caused harm to a human being, yet our contemporary law abounds in forfeiture and pure-food cases with headings like United States v. 900 Cases of Peaches (1975) and United States v. One 1967 Pontiac Bonneville Convertible (1973)….
The continuities between past and present are many. Battles over jury selection, so typical today in big trials, propel the plot of Burnt Njal, a medieval Icelandic saga involving arson-murder and bloody retribution. The tendentious interpretation of ambiguous marks on witnesses’ bodies — a hideous aspect of the witch hysteria of the 16th and 17th centuries — reappears in the child-abuse prosecutions of our own era. Denunciation boxes, into which citizens dropped accusing notes in Inquisition times, popped up in police stations across Russia in the 1930s. Hype-fraught celebrity trials? They date back pretty much forever and serve useful purposes, such as calling attention to social problems that would never stir public debate if left abstract….Regarding the emotionally manipulative style of some courtroom champions, Mr. Kadri finds plenty of precedent. He quotes the 1897 Tennessee Supreme Court, which said that “tears have always been considered legitimate arguments before a jury. Indeed, if counsel has them at his command, it may be seriously questioned whether it is not his professional duty to shed them whenever proper occasion arises.”
As for glittering but empty turns of courtroom rhetoric, Johnnie Cochran was just building on a tradition that goes back to Shakespeare’s time. “Elizabethan schoolboys,” Mr. Kadri writes, “were commonly taught adoxography, the art of eruditely praising worthless things….The first English treatise on the subject appeared in 1593 and contained essays celebrating deformity, ugliness, poverty, blindness, drunkenness, sterility, and stupidity. Its preface claimed that it would be particularly useful to lawyers.”
Read the whole thing here if you are a subscriber, or go out and buy a copy of the Journal. Incidentally, the Journal’s editors had to drop a couple of paragraphs of my original review draft for space reasons. Here they are:
* On the centuries-old practice of digging up the rotting remains of deceased persons to make them stand trial on criminal charges, a judge named Pierre Ayrault observed in 1591 that after all it is natural to regard the reputations of the dead as of continuing interest — wouldn’t we want to free a wrongly accused decedent from suspicion? That still didn’t explain why it would be needful to exhume a corpse, so Ayrault suggested a painting of the accused be hung in court instead.
* On the differences, some apparent and some real, between American and British justice: “Plea bargaining has never been given legal recognition in England. Barristers nevertheless haggle over pleas and judges give ‘indications’ of their likely sentences almost every day in almost every court of the land.” On the other hand, some differences are very real indeed, as with British judges’ power to summarize for jurors the weight of evidence in a case: “The summing-up invariably pays lip service to the principle of jury independence — typically, by ending a devastating criticism with the observation, ‘It is, of course, entirely a matter for you.'”
UK: Army tanks could run afoul of noise edict
“Defence chiefs are fighting to prevent the Army’s tanks being stopped in their tracks by the introduction of a European directive on vibration and noise at work. The Control of Vibration at Work Regulations and the Control of Noise at Work Regulations have left officers scrambling to discover if the military’s armoured vehicles break the rules.” The Ministry of Defence intends to invoke an “opt-out” provision to escape compliance; “If you are in a combat situation then clearly it will be difficult to bring in these regulations,” explained a spokesman for the health and safety executive, another government agency which is implementing the directive. (Thomas Harding, “‘Noise at work’ rules threaten to knock out Army’s tanks”, Daily Telegraph, Sept. 2). In the past, British defense officials have expressed alarm that the noise of gunfire during infantry training and even military brass bands could violate EU noise-at-work rules: see Dec. 22-25, 2000.
“Picking patrons’ pockets”
The United Kingdom has reluctantly joined 19 other EU countries “adopting the droit de suite, or artist’s resale right, which requires sellers to pay artists (or their heirs) as much as 4% of the price every time a piece is resold, for up to 70 years after an artist’s death. (The droit does not apply to sales between two collectors.)” The rule, which applies retroactively to art created in the past and already in collectors’ hands, is likely to harm British galleries and dealers — and perhaps artists as well — by driving the international art market to countries that do not enforce such rules. “The cream of the crop of important modern and contemporary art has already fled Europe and is beginning to leave London in anticipation of 2006,” says Dallas economist David Kusin, who conducted a study on the subject for the European Fine Art Foundation. (Susan Adams, Forbes, Jun. 20).
Another broadcast appearance
For our British readers, I’ll be discussing the Judge Roberts nomination on one of the BBC’s news shows (presumably “The World” on BBC4), sometime around 7 pm UK time.
No running — this is a playground
Courtesy Matt Conigliaro (Jul. 18): swings and other fun elements are disappearing fast from South Florida playgrounds under lawyering pressure. “To say ‘no running’ on the playground seems crazy,” says Broward County School Board member Robin Bartleman, whose own 6-year-old daughter is disappointed in the playground at Everglades Elementary in Weston. “But your feelings change when you’re in a closed-door meeting with lawyers.” “Play is one of children’s chief vehicles for development,” said University of Texas emeritus professor Joe Frost, who runs the Play and Playgrounds Research Project there. “Right now it looks like we’re developing a nation of wimps.” (Chris Kahn, “In the pursuit of safety, teeter-totters and swings are disappearing from playgrounds”, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Jul. 18). See Sept. 8, Mar. 5, etc. More: Liz Lightfoot, “Schools ‘wrap children in cotton wool'”, Daily Telegraph (U.K.), May 3.
Notable quote
The whole point of the rule of law is the certainty it gives the citizen. There is no greater injustice than for a citizen to be unable to determine what legal consequences would flow from an action contemplated.
— Matthew Parris, writing on the vaguely worded speech-prohibitions in the British Government’s proposed Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. (“This is no sort of way to make a law -– and no sort of law to make”, The Times (U.K.), Jun. 25). For more on the legislation, see Jul. 16, 2004 and Jun. 11, 2005.
Update: U.K. court rejects smoker’s lawsuit
Once again the inevitable worldwide triumph of tobacco litigation turns out to be not so inevitable after all: “In the first case of its kind in Britain, a judge rejected Margaret McTear’s attempt to sue Imperial Tobacco over the death of her husband Alf 12 years ago. … Lord Nimmo Smith, at the Court of Session in Edinburgh, said the test case failed on every count. He ruled that Mr McTear knew what he was doing and there was no proof that his cancer was caused by a particular cigarette brand.” (Auslan Cramb, “Widow fails to pin blame on tobacco company”, Daily Telegraph, Jun. 1). Ever the gracious loser, Northeastern University lawprof-advocate and interest-nondiscloser Richard Daynard called the ruling “an extraordinarily ignorant opinion”: “The UK suffers from a conservative, narrow-minded judiciary who don’t know or don’t want to know the relevant medical and social facts,” he said. (Stephen Davis, “Smokescreen”, New Statesman, Jun. 27)($).
U.K.: fruit trees get council axe
“A council is cutting down dozens of healthy trees because it fears that it will be sued if people slip on fallen fruit. Mature crab apple and pear trees are the prime targets of the cull by Havering council, east London, which said it had never been sued by anyone over rotten, slippery fruit on the pavement but the potential existed for such action.” Homeowners have protested, to no avail so far. (David Sapsted, “Trees cut down amid fears of fruit case”, Daily Telegraph, Jun. 18).
In Britain, less fearful M.D.s
David Asman, reflecting on his wife’s experience in British and American hospitals, notices some patterns (“There’s No Place Like Home”, American Spectator/Wall Street Journal, Jun. 8):
There is also much less of a tendency in British medicine to make decisions on the basis of whether one will be sued for that decision. This can lead to a much healthier period of recuperation. For example, as soon as my wife was ambulatory, I was determined to get her out of the hospital as much as possible….
Now try leaving a hospital as an inpatient in the U.S. In fact, we did try and were frustrated at every step. You’d have better luck breaking out of prison. Forms, permission slips and guards at the gate all conspire to keep you in bounds. It was clear that what prevented us from getting out was the pressing fear on everyone’s part of getting sued. Anything happens on the outside and folks naturally sue the hospital for not doing their job as the patient’s nanny.
Why are the Brits so less concerned about being sued? I can only guess that Britain’s practice of forcing losers in civil cases to pay for court costs has lessened the number of lawsuits, and thus the paranoia about lawsuits from which American medical services suffer….