1 Mr Justice Hammond delivered an unusual appeal judgment in New Zealand in 1993. The case was about a $100 fine imposed on a man for not having a dog licence. Speaking of comparable minor cases, the appeal judge noted that the original judge “peruses the mountain of files with great care and then imposes whatever penalty he or she deems appropriate. No hearing is held . . . No tears are shed. No howls of derision are heard from the gallery . . .The judge sits alone in his chambers and affixes his facsimile signature to the information sheet perhaps muttering silent curses to himself as he does so.”
2 A case in 1978 in Florida concerned a dispute between Dr Herbert Zim, who wrote many books in a simplified science series called “Golden Guides”, and his publisher. Judge Goldberg adopted a biblical style for his judgment. It opens “In the beginning, Zim created the concept of the Golden Guides. For the earth was dark and ignorance filled the void. And Zim said, let there be enlightenment and there was enlightenment.” Concluding pages later, Judge Goldberg said: “And it therefore shall come to pass that the district judge shall write another chapter in the chronicle of Zim.”
3 Unsurprisingly, the order of Judge Martin Sheehan cancelling a trial he was due to hear in Kentucky in 2011 does not feature widely in literary anthologies. His order states that news of a settlement had “made this court happier than a tick on a fat dog because it is otherwise busier than a one-legged cat in a sandbox and, quite frankly, would have rather jumped naked off of a 12ft stepladder into a five-gallon bucket of porcupines than have presided over a two-week trial of the dispute herein . . .”
4 In wartime England in 1941, a subjective ministerial power to imprison was permitted by the House of Lords. In a potent speech, Lord Atkin dissented. “I view with apprehension the attitude of judges who . . . show themselves more executive minded than the executive . . . In this country, amid the clash of arms, the laws are not silent.” The phrase was adapted from Cicero who made the opposite point: that laws were then silent in war.
Advertisement
5 In excusing a chauffeur who had crashed after being hijacked in New York in 1941, Judge Carlin said: “If the philosophic Horatio and the martial companions of his watch were ‘distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear’ when they beheld ‘in the dead vast and middle of night’ the disembodied spirit of Hamlet’s father stalk majestically by ‘with a countenance more in sorrow than in anger,’ was not the chauffeur, though unacquainted with the example of these eminent men-at-arms more amply justified in his fearsome reactions . . .”
6 In a 2003 appeal in Alabama, Judge Carnes wrote a fictional drama to make a point about spousal wiretapping. “JIM: Honey, I’ve been thinking, we ought to move to Alabama. LIZ: But Sweetheart, I thought you liked living in Colorado. JIM: I do, Sugar, but there’s a problem. LIZ: What’s troubling you, Sweetie? JIM: Well, Punkin’, Colorado is in the Tenth Circuit, and its federal appeals court has held that if I wiretap your private conversations without your knowledge and consent, I may have to pay you damages if you find out and sue me in federal court.”
7 In a drug case in 2008, Justice Roberts adopted Raymond Chandler’s style in opening his dissenting judgment. “North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three- dollar steak . . . Devlin spotted him: a lone man on the corner. Another approached. Quick exchange of words. Cash handed over; small objects handed back. Each man then quickly on his own way. Devlin knew the guy wasn’t buying bus tokens.”
8 Mr Justice Stable gave a most erudite summing up to a London jury in 1954. The publisher of The Philanderer was prosecuted for obscenity. Addressing the opinion that it is proper to pretend sex does not exist, the judge noted that in the Victorian era in some houses “the legs of tables were actually draped and rather stricter females never referred as such to gentlemen’s legs but called them their ‘understandings’ ”. The jury acquitted.
9 In a dissent in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1966, Justice Musmanno gave a literary criticism of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer: “Cancer is not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity. And in the center of all this waste and stench, besmearing himself with its foulest defilement, splashes, leaps, cavorts and wallows a bifurcated specimen that responds to the name of Henry Miller.”
Advertisement
10 In a case about competitive bidding for an energy development project, the US appeals court in Louisiana gave its decision with startling simplicity: “In this appeal we are asked to determine whether ‘.82’ is the equivalent of ‘82 per cent’. Having successfully completed grammar school, we are able to answer the question in the affirmative.”
Gary Slapper is global professor at New York University, director of NYU London, and a door tenant at 36 Bedford Row. The third edition of his book How the Law Works is published by Routledge