Law: The Rules of the Game, the House Rules and the Big Casino

Daniel Finkelstein of The Times has posted a new competition that lets you get to play at being a rule-maker. Just click the title to play and you are an instant Parliamentary Draftsman.

Lawyers love rules. Not only do we have thousands of statutes; we then have procedural rules, with lots of commentary and case law on those.

No litigator leaves the office to go to court without volume 1 of the White Book (this not only contains the Civil Procedure Rules but lots and lots of commentary and case references).

The bare bones of the CPR can be found here but you will not really be equipped to engage in the fine art of legal combat unless you acquire a copy of the White Book.

Volume 2 is taken out for a walk less often because:

1. the lawyer does not wish to risk a finding of contributory negligence for carrying too much weight should he trip over or fall down any stairs and want to sue someone; and,



2. his opponent is less likely to refer to something in volume 2 that he or she is not already aware of (it is largely a collection statutes etc. already available elsewhere); and,



3. hernias are bad for one's practice. NB: women can get hernias as well as men.

Each volume is bigger than the average house brick, and weighs as much or more, so they are a clear and present danger to anyone who carries them around. I suppose they could also be useful as a weapon of defence. Also, they do not carry the same risk of being had up for going equipped as you might if you were carrying an actual house brick.

But lawyers love the White Book. Assiduous study of its many thousands of pages of procedural law (printed on thin paper and with the notes printed in tiny type) have won many a case. The main use is therefore as a weapon of offence. Not by throwing it but by being aware of its contents.

The notes in the White Book keep lawyers employed. Years of training are necessary to understand these procedural rules (!) and the arcane and delphic utterances of the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords upon what they might or might not mean lead to the conclusion that, since they (the Lords and the Lords Justices of Appeal) cannot agree, I might have been right so you cannot get me for negligence if I advise you the wrong way.

Well, you might pot me - given what I have said above - but every other lawyer is safe.

"Put your money on red," I might have said. I might have explained to you that there was a limited chance of the ball hitting black (given the current state of the case law) and virtually no chance of a green (zero or double zero). In a casino I would have given you different advice. I would have told you that it was entirely random. I would have told you that there was no such thing as the law of averages.

Casino type advice is now required by our pro-active judges who demand that we practice clairvoyance rather than law and nowhere more so than in the family courts. I will post further about these anathema on another occasion.