No one needs to prove the existence of the Beatles. But other ‘facts’ aren’t so obvious, writes Ian Gascoigne in the first of a series of two articles on assessors & judicial notice
- Judicial notice sits second in a hierarchy of decisions about facts.
- Once a factual matter has been proved in one case, a later court cannot simply read it across into another.
- Judicial notice is a useful shortcut, but it has limited application.
Mr Justice Foxton talked recently to the Liverpool Business and Property Courts Forum. His subject, appropriately for that city, was a condensed history of litigation involving the Beatles. The topic recalls an earlier judge whose question to counsel—‘Who are the Beatles?’—has gone down in judicial folklore.
That question is clearly one that Foxton J would not have needed to ask. As the judge said in his talk, the Beatles are one of the ‘icons of 20th century culture’. In a claim in which it was necessary to understand
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