Seeing Justice Done

Seeing Justice Done is aimed at students and overseas lawyers, and at everyone with the time and inclination to visit the Law Courts and Tribunals of Central London as a spectator. The book describes where each of them is to be found, and what goes on inside them. Prominent lawyers explain the difference between barristers and solicitors, and there are eighteen interviews with individuals involved, willingly or unwillingly, in what lawyers call the administration of justice, ranging from a High Court Judge to a persistent criminal. This book is about people; the people who work in the courts and tribunals, and the people who appear in them. The Judge, the Foreman of the Jury, the Prosecutor, the Accused, the Defence Junior, the Solicitor, the Policeman, the Court Artist, and the Taxi Driver, all give their personal insight into how thing are done. However, nobody could possibly write about London's law courts without devoting at least a couple of pages to that astonishing extravaganza of Victorian gothic madness, the Royal Courts of Justice. The author also finds space to include items on court dress and behaviour. He relates two contrasting examples of contempt. The first, quoting from Megarry's Miscellany at Law, of a law report of 1631, written in the debased law French used in law reports at that time, concerns a defendant who 'ject un brickbat a le dit Justice que narrowly mist & pur ceo immediately fuit Indictment drawn per Noy envers le prisoner, son dexter namus ampute & fix al Gibbet sur que luy mesme immediatement hange in presence de court'. The second, a more recent case of a female witness who extracted from a paper parcel a dead cat, and threw it, inaccurately at the judge. This time there was no amputation, no hanging. The judge merely remarked 'Madam, if you do that again, I shall commit you for contempt'.