Sometimes I think people forget what the law is for. There are lawyers, I am afraid to say, who think the law is there so they can make a living, a very good one in some cases. Government ministers seem to think it is either a drain on the public purse or a means through which liberal trouble makers can block or upset their policy initiatives. And some newspaper columnists seem to think it’s only for the educated.
Read more...It’s been a while since I’ve had a go at insurance companies, but sometimes they make it so easy it’s impossible not to comply. Their adverts might try to make you think they are there in your hour of need, indeed the prime minister thinks they are, but don’t be fooled by the smiling nodding dog, insurers will do their best not to pay up when you need it most.
Read more...I’ve never heard of Edward Furlong, but he doesn’t sound like a very nice chap. Having been charged with battery twice at the end of last year he has been arrested again for allegedly attacking his girlfriend. He’s also been sued by a previous girlfriend for ‘assault’ and has been banned from spending time alone with his six-year-old son. If I weren’t already very unlikely to watch his films I’d now make a point of boycotting them.
Read more...Some movies scenes you never forget: the shower scene in Psycho, which had me checking behind the shower curtain for years; the opening of Jaws, which made a generation terrified to get in the swimming pool; Bobbie’s father walking through the steam in The Railway Children that still makes me cry and want to give my dad a hug; the heartbreaking sequence of the girl’s red coat in Schindler’s List.
Read more...Hands up, who has already broken their new year’s resolution? Apparently about 75 per cent of us will fail after just nine days, which makes them hardly worth bothering with (unless, say, your resolution was to decorate the living room by 8 January 2013). Mine are suitably unoriginal, but since I recommit to them at least once a month they don’t really count as new year’s resolutions.
Read more...Would you rather represent yourself in court or perform your own appendectomy? It sounds like a fairly straightforward question and at first thought, and quite possibly second and third thoughts as well, most of us would plump for representing ourselves in court: there is, arguably, less blood, less pain and less chance of death.
Read more...A few weeks ago on a train to Birmingham for the Conservative Party conference I found myself in a heated debate with two fellow travellers, only one of whom I know. I should point out this doesn’t happen very often, but party conferences do funny things to people, of which talking to complete strangers on the train is possibly the least weird.
Read more...Should prisoners have the right to vote? It sounds like a simple yes-no question and most people would probably be able to give a yes or no answer, but it is giving the government no end of headaches.
Read more...Twenty-three years is a long time. You should be able to get a lot done like, I don’t know, invent new things, build cities, go to Mars and back, grow up. There aren’t many things that actually take 23 years, unless someone in your family died at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. Then you’ll find it takes 23 years to get the truth.
Read more...Just as with anything else that requires human input, justice is not an exact science. Even when evidence seems irrefutable, there are often other factors, such as intent and causation or errors in procedure, making outcomes that may seem certain anything but. Nonetheless, we have an expectation that the justice system is capable of producing the ‘right’ verdict in any given trial and feel both uncomfortable and aggrieved when this isn’t the case.
Read more...There are, I am led to believe, quite a few people out there who aren’t at all interested in football. It must be very annoying for them that even though the football season and the Euros are over (Olympic football doesn’t count), football is still on the front page of the newspapers, and not in a good way.
Read more...Anyone watching the excellent BBC Four series
The Strange Case of the Law can’t fail to have noticed the irony inherent in his premise that the English common law system can be traced back to the simple compensation culture of early Anglo-Saxon Kent. If anything should dispel the myth that we are slipping, or indeed have slipped, into an alarming spiral of moral decline brought about by an American-style propensity to sue for anything and everything, this should be it.
