Law and laughter

TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS - An appealing anthology of legal humour: Daniel R. White; Universal Law Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd., C-FF-1A, Ansal's Dilkush Industrial Estate, G.T. Karnal Road, Delhi- 110033. Rs. 315.

WIT AND humour are not alien to court and litigation although judges are often pretentiously grave and lawyers vexatiously verbose, together making the Bench and the Bar more like a bout ring with bleeding noses than a serene scene where truth and justice are the solemn pursuit. Even so, legal humour and judicial fun do gain access to forensic theatres and provide literary laughter. Megarry, in lovely language, writes in Miscellany at Law: ``Not all law is dull nor all lawyers solemn. Far removed from that type of `humour' which sometimes precedes `laughter in court', there is a type of verbal felicity endemic in the law which lifts many a page of the law reports into the realms of literature.''

The book under review presents an anthology of drollery where lawyers, clients and courts are the players. Wise saws and quick repartees, jokes at the expense of the robed brethren and puerile submissions in court and absurd exchanges between learned friends are caricatures of the judicature which may, if portrayed by a talented writer produce anthologies enjoyable in lighter moods and hours of levitous leisure. Delectable dimensions of court proceedings can make pleasurable reading especially when the author is a Mark Twain or A. P. Herbert or Charles Dickens or Art Buchwald. To collect, after long search and research, an anthology of legal humour and judicial laughter is a hard job but a rare contribution to the lighter side of English literature.

The product of the industrious exploration of Daniel White is the entertaining anthology giving the reader a happy opportunity to have a hearty laugh at a venerable profession which has the power to put you in prison if by excessive ridicule you scandalise the odd weapons of the wig and gown. It has been rightly stated about the book thus: ``From judge to jurist and counsel to clerk, anyone in the legal world - and all those who have tangled with it - will find much to laugh at in this entertaining anthology which humorously explores the people, myths and jargon of this most venerable profession.''

One of the unusual pieces written by H. L. Menchen, titled ``The Judicial Arm'', deserves reading when one is tipsy so that the full savour of the humour can be imbibed. The robe on the bench and bottle after bottle at a bar dinner - the bench-bottle episode - cannot be dramatised so beautifully by the reviewer as the author has done because it needs a Mumbai or Delhi Bench-Bar nocturnal nexus. The reviewer belongs to the opposite camp denouncing, as he did in a sober ruling, the jocose, bellicose, lachrymose and comatose stages of the diner-winer camaraderie.

Art Buchwald, with whom Indian newspaper readers are familiar, has written on ``A Great Humour''. It is short and must be read. Its opening and concluding passages are as follows: ``The worst thing that can happen to any public official in this country is to be mentioned for a top appointment in the government and not get it. It isn't just the rejection of the job that is hard to swallow - it is that while he is under consideration, the candidate is being subjected to exhaustive investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Harward Law Review, and his reputation can be destroyed forever.''

The judge (in the U.S) is grilled in the nomination approval process. Buchwald concludes: ``The American Bar Association rated me as `less medicore', and this certainly hasn't helped me keep any decorum in the courtroom. From what I can tell, Judge, I said, ``you might have done better by not being mentioned as a possible Supreme Court Justice. Frankly, he replied, if it wasn't for the honor, I would just as soon forget it.''

Surely it is a horror or nightmare for an Indian judge to perform such a circus. But this transparency, excessively aggressive though, must remind Indians that the secrecy of a cabal of apex court judges or political echelons must be replaced by a sober, open operation. An old Roman adage says: ``Whatever touches us all should be decided by all.''To do justice to the process of appointment of justices, the operation must be radically revised from a dark room discovery to a more functionally participatory serendipity.

Bernard Levin writes on ``The Man Who Missed The Clapham Omnibus'' - one of the great representative fictional characters of the law. He presents this odd beast in the company of the man in the street. When the bus fares were raised the man could not afford to travel by omnibus and so, says Levin, ``I have not for many years heard him cited as an example of all that is sensible, reasonable and widely believed!'' Lawyers have enough to laugh at the disappearance of the omnibus traveller. The fiction of the man on the Clapham Omnibus, a judicial concoction, has vanished. People cannot afford a bus, what with fare hike and delayed arrivals due to traffic jams. The pedestrian may soon be a casualty in the street or unreasonably reasonable man in slow, safe locomotion. The Court in India must give up English law metaphors to be realistic. ``Is a golfer a gentleman?'' asks A.P. Herbert since that elite game is alien to the reviewer but a gentle favourite of the author who raises an interesting point of law upon the meaning of the word ``gentleman'' which was decided in an English court. In India, under the guise of public interest litigation (PIL), robed authoritarians rule on absurd issues which fools in the streets may often dismiss as jokes.

The appetite to waste learned court on time trivial PIL is stimulated by the simian media inclination in the newspapers to publish the name of the moron on the Bench the next day, sometimes at the instance of the judge hungry for fame, forgetting the ``fool'' effect on the judge.

A.P. Herbert - how delightful is his diction and risible his joke at the judges - writes about golfers: ``Men who would face torture without a word become blasphemous at the short fourteenth. It is clear that the game of golf may well be included in that category of intolerable provocations which may legally excuse or mitigate behaviour not otherwise excusable, and that under that provocation the reasonable or gentleman may reasonably act like a lunatic or lout respectively, and should legally be judged as such.''

He adds: ``There is certainly abundant judicial and literary authority for the view that by `gentleman' we mean a personal quality and not a social status. We have all heard of Nature's gentlemen. ``Clothes do not make the gentleman,'' said Lord Mildew in Cook v. The Mersey Docks and Harbour Board (1896) 2 A.C., meaning that a true gentleman might be clad in the four rags of an author. In the old maxim manners maketh man? (See Charles v The Great Western Railway) there is no doubt that by ``man'' is meant gentleman, and that manners is contrasted with wealth or station.

Mr. Thomas, for the prosecution, has quoted against these authorities an observation of the poet Shakespeare that ``The price of darkness is a gentleman,'' but quotations from Shakespeare (in court) are generally meaningless and always unsound. This one, in my judgment, is both. I am more impressed by the saying of another author (whose name I forget) that the king can make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.'' The reviewer must stop here lest his review may prove to be scholarly vanity, even venality. Better buy the book and in relaxed evenings enjoy it, rich as an appealing anthology of forensic fun. We must be grateful to the publishers for republishing lovely legal volumes, English and American, at devalued Indian prices. Do read because ``reading maketh a full man'' as old Bacon has said.

V. R. KRISHNA IYER

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