Some errors are small and forgivable, but whether this is so may depend on the judge
In this week’s NLJ, Ffyon Reilly, barrister at No5 Barristers’ Chambers and senior lecturer at City Law School, takes a look at judicial discretion in the employment tribunals.
Reilly considers case law around rule 37, which requires an appeal to be instituted within 42 days. Subsections refer to minor infractions and the recommended course of judicial action.
Reilly covers amendments to the rules, as well as cases illustrating how courts have responded to various minor errors. She writes: ‘This unforgiving set of rules was applied uniformly to provide what the Court of Appeal described in Jurkowska… as an “equality of misery”, when looking at examples of having to refuse to waive delays of mere minutes or hours in filing “where they would not have hesitated to enlarge time had there been a similar lapse in filing the papers in the Civil Appeals Office”.’
