Vexatious Litigant in UK Law

While I am unable to support the whole of the judge's reasoning, I am in no doubt that his decision was correct. 32, r.6 can only apply to an order made in proceedings in which the person seeking to have it set aside is either a party or entitled to be made one. The court could not accede to an application made by a person who had no locus standi to make it.

It appears from those observations that Davies LJ assumed that there could be no question of joining the proposed defendant. The Attorney General was in a different position because it was he who had brought the proceedings in which the applicant had been declared a vexatious litigant. It was he, and only he, who had the locus standi to appear on the application; see also the observations of Brooke J in Re C (The Times, 14th November 1989).

While I cannot agree with Sir John Wood that the observations made in the two Ewing cases are of more than persuasive authority in the decision of the question that now confronts us, they are certainly valuable as demonstrating an assumption that a defendant to proceedings for the institution of which leave has been given under section 42(3) cannot apply to set the leave aside.

The fact that the plaintiff or his solicitor has behaved badly in the first action does not make him into a vexatious litigant barred from bringing any further proceedings without permission of the courts. In my view, the second action could not be dismissed as an abuse of the process of the court whatever inexcusable delay there may have been in the conduct of the first action.

A civil restraint order is likely to be appropriate when the litigant's conduct has the hallmark of one who is content to indulge in a course of conduct which evidences an obsessive resort to litigation and a disregard of the need to have reasonable grounds for making an application to the court.

But there is no ambiguity or lacuna in the present section and it seems clear to us that the draftsman intended all court proceedings to be comprised under the heading of either civil or criminal proceedings. He intended "all proceedings" to be just that, and cannot have intended to leave a well defined class of proceedings uncovered.

The new Act does not prevent Mr. Vernazza from continuing proceedings which it is proper for him to carry on. It only prevents him from continuing proceedings which are an abuse of the process of the Court. They are only exercising a control over their own procedure. No man, let alone a vexatious litigant, has a vested right to bring or continue proceedings which are an abuse of the process of the Court.