Foreword

AuthorPeter Lyons
Pages5-6
Foreword

I keep close at hand a cathartic collection of examples of appalling advocacy. After a bad day in court, it is reassuring to be reminded that it could have been so much worse.

When licking my professional wounds, I like to recall that in the United States Supreme Court in 1972, the assistant prosecutor from Louisville, Kentucky was asked in oral argument by Justice Douglas why his argument was so perfunctory. ‘Your Honor must realise’, the advocate replied, ‘I am a very busy man’.1In 1981, a court in Tennessee told an advocate during his submissions, ‘we shall have no more of this’, and issued an injunction to restrain him from bringing any similar cases in the future.2In 2005, at...

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