Separating Truth from Fiction

In one sense court proceedings are about getting at the truth. More accurately, about each side trying to get the court to accept a version of the truth that is established within the evidential rules.

It is not quite that straightforward when it comes to considering stories about lawyers or courtroom events. Sometimes things that actually happened in court become stories which are not treated as genuine. Others begin as jokes and end up being touted as things which actually happened. The problem is that occasionally what passes in the court room is so bizarre that you would have trouble in any individual instance deciding whether something had a truthful basis or not.

PC Wren

An author called P.C. Wren (who very few of you will ever have heard of, but who was an ex-foreign legionnaire who wrote stories about life in the French Foreign Legion, the most famous of which was called Beau Geste) once wrote a story in which a woman successfully joined the Legion and passed herself off as a man. This was panned by critics as being a story based on such a ludicrous premise that it could not be taken seriously. In the preface to the second edition, P.C. Wren agreed with them, but cited as his justification that the premise on which he based the story was true, and that if they went to a particular Legion Cemetery they would find the gravestone of the woman who had served for many years in the Legion and was only discovered to be a man when she was killed in action. Some courtroom stories are like that. Sometimes it is the more obviously preposterous which turned out to be true.

Conception

Take one instance. A litigant in person, representing himself, was suing two companies in the County Court. It was a trial listed for two days, but was plainly going to run for longer. Counsel represented each of the defendants, so it was him against two barristers. At the end of a hard first day, he told the judge that he would like the court not to sit the following day, and adjourn to another date, because his wife was due to conceive their first child and he wanted to be there. The judge, somewhat startled by this, asked the defence barristers what they thought. After conferring in whispers, one of them said "We are sure that he means deliver her first child not conceive it, but we both think that in either eventuality it is important that he is there.". Could that really have happened? It seems unlikely. Someone with a lot of experience of the situations court room can throw up would not be quite so sure.

F E Smith

Stories abound about the great F. E. Smith (utterly brilliant junior barrister and then utterly brilliant QC and eventually Lord Chancellor). I could devote the next year of QC blog to telling F. E. Smith stories and never get through them. Just one gives you the flavour. After F. E. Smith had outlined the facts and the law in a complex case, the Judge said "Having heard your opening Mr Smith, I am none the wiser.". "Doubtless." Smith replied instantly, "but you are no doubt better informed.". Smith certainly had the reputation, the nerve and the panache to have carried off something like that, whether he actually did so or not.

A warning

Such stories are for young lawyers to be amused by, not to emulate. Comics when publishing stories about "super heroes" often say words the effect of "you should not try this at home". Stories about past lawyers should sometimes come with a warning to young barristers that "you should not try this in court".

Michael J. Booth QC