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THE LAWYER’S WORLD IS A STAGE

If I may be so bold as to coin a phrase ‘words are a lawyer’s best friend’. That’s one way of looking at one of Shakespeare’s most famous quotes put on the lips of one of his most villainous characters ‘the first thing we do is kill all the lawyers’.  Often seen as a disparaging witticism against crooked, expensive lawyers, probably the real sentiment behind the words is that lawyers are Guardians of the Peace, who speak up for justice, so they should be the first to be exterminated in order to give a better chance for a coup to prevail. Interestingly, around about when Shakespeare wrote those words, lawyers were more available to the wealthy. That’s pretty much the situation nowadays, especially as legal aid has been progressively cut back, especially in family law. It has become the norm for parties to appear in the Family Court where one, or even both of them, is not formally represented. This leads to a situation where the litigants as well as the Court are deprived of the lawyer’s ability to use words which encourage diplomacy, or even compromise.

So going back to words, I recently got the shock of my life when I read an article (not a Judgement) by a reputable Family Court Judge which contained the word ‘niggardly’. This is outrageous, I thought, as I searched for the email address for the Judicial Conduct Investigation Office (JCIO), which is the body to which complaints against the Judiciary are made. However, when I sensibly decided to analyse the word a little more closely first, on the basis that to act in haste is to repent at leisure, I learned that it had little to do with the cowardly racial slur. In fact, etymologically it has nothing at all do with that word! The Oxford Dictionary tells me that it is an adjective, first used in 1549, which means ‘having a miserly nature; mean; parsimonious; sparing’. I can therefore now agree that when it comes to the question of making funds available for legal aid, the government is indeed niggardly!

Sticking to our quartet of themes – words, Shakespeare, The Law and the Family – I was interested to note that Shakespeare’s quotes about family relations often reflect love, wisdom, parental responsibility and familial bonds. A typical example of this is ‘the voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven’s lieutenants’. The Children Act makes it very clear that children mostly benefit from both parents having an input into their lives, whether they remain in a relationship with each other or not. Family Court Judges, in their capacity of being ‘judicial parents’ rarely forget this. Indeed, the legal concept of Parental Responsibility is largely seen as a set of benefits for the child, rather than as a Right for the parents.

Incidentally, it’s just as well that towards the end of the nineties we began to heed a clarion call for legal language to be made simpler. Thus, decree nisi is now simply a ‘conditional order’ and confusing tautologies like ‘let, allow and permit’ have become a thing of the past. ‘Just as well’ I hear you cry! The status quo would have been unsustainable, unsupportable, and untenable!