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Missing facts & legislative fictions

02 February 2024 / John Gould
Issue: 8057 / Categories: Opinion , Criminal
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Legislating to exonerate the subpostmasters would create an illusion of justice, says John Gould. The proper approach should be to speed up the process, not abandon it

There is a famous aphorism that hard cases make bad law. Hard cases are said to include those in which there is special hardship or public controversy. Hard cases, in the words of the American jurist and judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, create ‘hydraulic pressures’, distorting the judgments of the justices. The judges’ oath, to be impartial and to take only the law, the facts and the evidence in the case into account, must be upheld even under the pressure of public sentiment or the judge’s own sympathy.

On the other hand, hard cases are the stock in trade of journalists and dramatists. Geoffrey Crowther, a long-serving editor of The Economist, is said to have advised young journalists to ‘simplify, then exaggerate’. There’s no point in writing if no one much reads what you have written. Dramatists and actors try to engage our feelings by

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NEWS
Artificial intelligence may be revolutionising the law, but its misuse could wreck cases and careers, warns Clare Arthurs of Penningtons Manches Cooper in this week's NLJ
Bea Rossetto of the National Pro Bono Centre makes the case for ‘General Practice Pro Bono’—using core legal skills to deliver life-changing support, without the need for niche expertise—in this week's NLJ
Small law firms want to embrace technology but feel lost in a maze of jargon, costs and compliance fears, writes Aisling O’Connell of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in this week's NLJ
Charles Pigott of Mills & Reeve reports on Haynes v Thomson, the first judicial application of the Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling in a discrimination claim, in this week's NLJ
The Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in July that overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, once poster boys of the Libor and Euribor scandal. In NLJ this week, Neil Swift of Peters & Peters considers what the ruling means for financial law enforcement
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