The genius of the common law …

Evan Whitton says the law has always been a highly profitable joke. This from Justinian (A REASONABLE DOUBT FOR A REASONABLE PRICE) 7 December 2010.

Sir Fred Pollock (3rd Baronet, 1845-1937) was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford 1883-1903. He got a KC at the mature age of 75, perhaps as a late reward for his series of lectures, The Genius of the Common Law (1912).

The first was titled Our Lady and Her Knights. Fred said: “We are here to do homage to our lady the Common Law; we are her men of life and limb and earthly worship.”

Fred decently did not say that down the centuries some Knights have crept into their Lady’s boudoir and had their swinish way with her.

Or that the real genius of the common law is that, as of today, the Knights have got away with rape for 844 years.

A cheap Royal Commission

For a Royal Commission into a single event, you could do worse than appoint a competent reporter. His/her inquiry would probably be more accurate and would certainly be quicker and cheaper.

Murray Sayle, the great Australian reporter who died last October, took four days to learn and confirm that British soldiers shot unarmed civilians in the back on Bloody Sunday in 1971.

Sayle’s inquiry cost perhaps £200: fares to Northern Ireland, a room in a seedy hotel, and a lot of beer and fish and chips.

Lord Saville and hordes of lawyers recently took 10 years to find what Sayle found in four days. Depending on who you believe, the cost was either £192 million or £400 million.

We name the guilty men

Murray Sayle said there are really only two newspaper stories:

ARROW POINTS TO DEFECTIVE PART

WE NAME THE GUILTY MEN

Several arrows are required for the common law: truth does not matter; lawyers trained in sophistry are in charge of evidence and can while away the days, months, years while untrained trial judges hide evidence from jurors.

Common lawyers are a tiny fraction – perhaps 0.04% – of the people on the planet. Nobody else believes that such defects can result in a system of justice.

Germans are among the 99.96% who believe that truth does matter. In their system, judges trained separately from lawyers control evidence; trials take a day or two.

Legal academic Annette Marfording has reported that senior Australian judges, including Tony Mason, Murray Gleeson, Jim Spigelman, and Ronnie Sackville have “expressed … resistance to the possibility of learning from the German system”.

Mason, now 85, wheeled out an inaccurate metaphor to resist learning from the Germans. I actually heard him say: “The common law is the Rolls Royce of legal systems.”

Mason spoke truer than he knew. On November 4, an explosion in a Rolls Royce engine – ARROW POINTS TO DEFECTIVE PART – went within a centimetre of torching 459 petrified Qantas passengers.

Morally bankrupt charlatans

The Sophists were not called morally bankrupt charlatans for nothing: they taught lawyers and judges how to lie.

NSW Chief Justice Jim Spigelman said on October 22: “It is all too easy to dress up a conclusion, reached on other grounds, by selecting from the smorgasbord of maxims and principles of interpretation those which assist the achievement of the predetermined result.”

A judge on the US Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, told an audience at the University of Central Missouri on March 4, 2008: “I don’t mean to suggest that in the bad old days judges never distorted the Constitution. Of course they did. You’re going to have wilful judges with you until the end of time. But in the good old days they had to distort the Constitution the good old fashioned honest way. They lied about it.”

Sophistry has consequences, and not only about the Constitution. In 2000, Scalia was one of five judges who wrongly appointed George W. Bush President. According to economist Joe Stiglitz, the $3 trillion that Bush blew on an unlawful invasion of Iraq was a hidden cause of the global recession.

Criminals’ right to get off

The Sydney Telegraph’s Joe Hildebrand has reported that the NSW Police Association is campaigning to modify the right of silence. As Justice Ken Marks pointed out 26 years ago, the “right” is based on a lie by Billy Blackstone, the morally bankrupt charlatan who was the first legal academic.

The cops apparently seek to allow prosecutors and judges to tell jurors that if a suspect/accused had an explanation, he would have given it.

Cameron Murphy, president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, told Mr Hildebrand that being pressured to answer questions that might incriminate them would result in countless innocent people going to jail.

Really? Cambridge law professor Glanville Williams said in The Proof of Guilt: A Study of the English Criminal Trial (Stevens, 1963): “Immunity from being questioned is a rule which by its nature can protect the guilty only. It is not a rule that may operate to acquit some guilty for fear of convicting some innocent.”

China Fangzheng Press has contracted to translate and republish Evan Whitton’s Our Corrupt Legal System.