Cui dono lepidum novum libellum? – To whom do I give my new elegant little book?
Catullus, of course.
In support of a liberal education, it’s hard to criticise the ideals of Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg offers over 38,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, you can download them or read them online.
However, at the cost of a few beers in Central London, and certainly infinitely more rewarding, I can strongly recommend ‘More Weird Cases: Comic and Bizarre Cases from Courtrooms around the World”. The link to the downloadable version is here, but it’s a small book which will easily fit in a bag of ‘reasonable’ size. Prof Gary Slapper indeed can be followed here on Twitter; here he is discussing jurisprudence of the State with eminent blogger @charonqc and others, in a recent podcast.
Where to start? I promised myself that I would review this book some time ago, but then I finished my MBA while starting the LPC and the rest is history. However, to coin a phrase, I genuinely haven’t been able to put this book down. Gary has a remarkable gift of being able to see ‘the wood from the trees’, and his thoughts on these further weird cases are immaculately structured. The chapter headings are on topics which you can’t help but feel immediately attracted to, like punishment and compensation, followed by love and sex (*haha*), children and animals, and jurors, friends and neighbours. The fact that lawyers should not take themselves too seriously, like their clients, is pervasive through this book. To whet your appetite, for example, Gary describes, in relation to the outstanding Prof Hart from Oxford, ‘on an American visit, he once went to give a speech at Yale without his paper, wearing two ties, and having locked himself out of his room.’
It’s easily possible to read this book ‘in one go’, although having read it from cover-to-cover I find myself looking up extracts from it which I remember. I’ve found it impossible to resist my enthusiasm about the cases on Twitter, on the @legalaware account, so I often mention the cases with links to reports of them. However, it would help enormously if people who follow me could read this book. Not only are the cases charming nuggets of jurisprudence as senior judges negotiate the inticacies of balancing the interests of the citizens and the law, the book is beautifully written. The language is highly accessible, with the author clearly thinking, ‘where on earth do we start with this one?’
Law is a beautiful discipline, and, despite all the whingeing, is an honour and privilege to practice in. Academics are very much part of the community where practitioners are battling out very real everyday issues. This book does something very important above all. It conveys perfectly the complexity of the balancing interests, and explains why they are important to the general public. I happened to see this book in Hammicks, the famous legal bookshop in Fleet Street, but I feel it would be equally at home in the WHSmiths of Liverpool Street train station.
I will desist from imparting some of the classic lines of this book, but it really is a gem! You could download it this minute if you wish to!
