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Frances Perlman (pictured) has signed up for a law degree with the OU and hopes to work in citizen's rights, when she qualifies. But what inspired her to court the law? Here she shares her inspiration...

I stared, I gaped, and I am sure that my eyes in that dim study were balls of dark fury.  He was lying.

Mr. W studied his plump, white fingers and said to them: “You must have imagined it.  I never told you to leave.”

“But you did!” I protested. “How can you deny it?”

He shook his head. “Can we just get on with the work?” he asked.

“No, we can’t,” I said.  “I need that letter from you.”

“I am certainly not giving you a letter,” he said. “You are the one who is choosing to leave.  I never told you to go.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He was blatantly lying.  How dare he? Only last Friday, just before I had gone home, Mr. W had told me that for health reasons he could no longer go on with his project. He asked me to think over the weekend when would be a good date for me to leave, and reassured me that he would give me an excellent reference as well as the necessary letter. The conversation had gone on for about fifteen minutes, and now he was denying that it had ever taken place.

Let me explain the situation at this point. This exchange did not take place in the UK but in a part of the world where I had been residing for a number of years. In that country, if an employer doesn’t give a leaving employee a letter stating that he or she is being released on good terms, the employee could find himself unable to get another job and almost certainly be denied unemployment benefits. Nobody would wish to find themselves in such a predicament, and I was a single mother with two children.

'But I had never actually considered that the law could protect me... Not that long ago, employers could get away with murder. They can’t anymore'

I suspect that over the weekend Mr. W had changed his mind about my leaving, began to panic that he wouldn’t find anyone to replace me who knew the work so well, and was hoping to frighten me into staying.  Underhand, spiteful and deceitful, but the truth is, I had seen flashes of that side of him over the years.  It just never affected me personally.

I said no more to Mr. W then, and he probably thought he had won, but I was already planning to contact a lawyer as soon as I left the office.  I had never had much to do with lawyers, but this one had helped with a matter to do with my flat, and he had seemed okay. As soon as I was outside in the street after work, I called him.

“Frances. Can’t talk long,” he said.

“Just give me a minute,” I pleaded, though actually expecting long, drawn out conversations and expensive visits to his office.

“Fire away.”

So I told the lawyer what had taken place with Mr. W, summing it up as best as I could.

“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “The law’s on your side. He has to give you the letter. You’ve been there longer than a year.” Now that I hadn’t expected.

“The law’s on my side?” I repeated.

“Yes.  Got to go.  Bye.”

The law was on my side. These were the words I kept hearing on the way home. Mr. W couldn’t cheat me and get away with it.  I had the backing of the law. Where would I have been without it?

Up until then, though I had a vague interest in legal matters, I mainly saw it through TV dramas, the kind where when lawyers aren’t captivating the jury with scintillating summations they are eyeing one another lasciviously at meetings.  =I also knew that lawyers came in handy with prenups.

But I had never actually considered that the law could protect me. I started to remember things I had heard from people who belonged to the generation before me. “The boss wanted me to sleep with him or he would fire me. I was afraid of starving.  What could I do?” “I couldn’t refuse to work 24 hour shifts.  I had a wife and kids to support.”

Not that long ago, employers could get away with murder. They can’t anymore. I went back to work the following day and told Mr. W that if he didn’t give me the letter I would take legal action. He must have known the law because he didn’t try to argue with me.  I got the letter.

And then, when I had the opportunity to return to the UK and decided to study with the OU, I didn’t hesitate when it came to choosing a subject.  It would be the law. I really hope I have the privilege one day of being able to reassure someone “The law is on your side”.

 

What inspired you to study?

 

Lawyers see many strange cases. Can you tell truth from fiction in this Weird Law quiz devised by Professor Gary Slapper, the founder of the OU's Law School?

There are 10 questions. A prize of a camera to the first three correct entries, plus the first will also receive a copy of Professor Slapper's latest book, More Weird Cases. 

 

1. As consumer litigation has become prolific, companies have taken extraordinary steps to cover themselves. Which, if any, of these product warnings is fabricated?

(a) Household iron - “Never iron clothes while they are being worn”

(b) Cocktail napkin picturing waterways of South Carolina - “Caution: not to be used for navigation”

(c) Digital thermometer - “Once used rectally, the thermometer should not be used orally”

(d) Toilet brush - “Do not use for personal hygiene”

 

2. Drivers have been prosecuted for doing some unusual things while driving. One of these is fictitious, which?

(a)  A lawyer was caught driving to Exeter while highlighting passages in Archbold, the 3,000 page tome on criminal pleading, on his lap

(b)  A safety expert was caught driving to Dundee at 60mph while shaving

(c)   A one-eyed man from Renfrewshire was caught driving while reading a newspaper

(d)   A man with no eyes was caught driving on the wrong side of the road in the West Midlands

 

3. Who said this in furtherance of a lawsuit? “I agreed to go with him, and on the walk to a private area, he told me he wanted to make love to me. [He] found a place where we could be alone – a bathroom.” 

(a) Ruby the Heart Stealer, a belly dancer who was a guest at a party Silvio Berlusconi hosted at his home last year

(b) Mariah Yeater, who brought a paternity suit against Justin Bieber

(c) Mike Jones, masseur, referring to Rev Tom Haggard, former leader of The National Association of Evangelicals

(d) Ginger White, referring to the origin of a 13-year affair with Mr Herman Cain

  

4. Match these offences with the number of times each appears in the law reports of the higher courts (i) benefit fraud (ii) shoplifting (iii) robbery (iv) corporate crime

(a) 1,367

(b) 1,044

(c) 11

(d) 255

  

5. Human rights are often misreported. Three of these headlines were published by newspapers, which wasn’t?

(a)  Police can’t put up ‘Wanted’ posters of dangerous criminals on the run because of their human rights

(b)  How a suspected car thief was granted his human rights to a KFC bargain and a 2-litre bottle of Pepsi

(c)   Cat has human right not to be chased by neighbour’s dog

(d)  Human rights laws cost Britain £42bn

 

6. All these court declarations were made by angry judges. Three were from the US. Which one was from an English judge? 

(a) “Give me a gun; I’m going to shoot his balls off and give him a .38 vasectomy”

(b) “I don’t care if either one or both of you win this case. I have shot and killed better men than both of you”

(c) “I’m going. It’s a f----ing travesty”

(d) “Keep that mouth of yours shut or I will...strangle you, you b--tard”

  

7. Denying legal aid to a man charged with trying to hire a prostitute, Judge Eamon O’Brien said: “If you can pay for the services of the oldest profession, then you can afford to pay for the services of the second oldest profession.” Which, if any, of the following prostitution cases is false? 

(a) In Ottawa, Laura Emerson, employed as a cleric at the courthouse, was accused of using it as the headquarters of her prostitute business

(b) In Vancouver a court ruled that a brothel business’s payments to bribe police weren’t tax deductible but payments to lawyers to defend its girls were tax deductible

(c) An English law of 1162 treated lawyers and prostitutes in the same category as service “vendors of mind or body”

(d) A Brooklyn tax lawyer claimed as part of his tax-deductible “medical expenses” $111,000 for “therapeutic sex” with prostitutes

  

8. Here are some figures on law in the American system. Match the descriptor with the figure: (i) annual number of bankruptcy filings in US federal courts; (ii) the number of dollars Judge Judy earns for a day’s work; (iii) the number of lawyers in the US; (iv) the number of people in American prisons.

(a) 1,596,355  

(b) 865,000 

(c) 1,225,452

(d) 2,300,000

 

9. Match the authors with the quotations:  (i) Jonathan Swift; (ii) John Mortimer; (iii) Oliver Wendell Holmes; (iv) Karl Marx 

(a) “Judges commonly are elderly men, and are more likely to hate at sight any analysis to which they are not accustomed”

(b) “Crime takes a part of the superfluous population off the labour market and thus reduces competition among the labourers”

(c) “Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through”

(d) “No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean fingernails”

 

10. Leaders and legislators don’t always shine. Match the quotations with the years in which they were said (i) 1985 (ii) 1992 (iii) 1994 (iv) 2007

(a) “Is the West Bank a publicly or privately owned financial institution?” Enzo Scotti, Italian Foreign Minister during a briefing on the Middle East  

(b) “Ah, I must have been reading it upside down. I thought it was 81, which did seem most unfair.” Member of House of Lords, asked if he would accept 18 as homosexual age of consent

(c) “There are more crimes in Britain now, due to the huge rise in the crime rate.”  Neil Kinnock MP

(d) “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian President, referring to the US

 

 

Email your answers to platform-competitions@open.ac.uk by no later than Friday 27 April 2012. Please make the subject of your email ‘Weird Law’ and include the number of each question and the correct answer(s), plus your full name and address. Entries wth all correct answers will be entered into a draw and the first three drawn will receive a prize. 

Gary Slapper is the founder of the Open University Law School and is a Visiting Professor at the OU. He is Global Professor at New York University, and Director of its London campus. His latest book More Weird Cases is published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill.

You can follow him on Twitter @garyslapper

Terms and conditions
This competition opens on 28/03/12 and closes on 27/04/2011. Prizes must be taken as offered and are not transferable or exchangeable for a cash equivalent. Only one entry per person. This competition is open to all except employees of The Open University. Entries must be received by 27 April 2012. The promoter accepts no responsibility for any entries that are incomplete, illegible, corrupted or fail to reach the promoter by the relevant closing date for any reason. The winners will be drawn and notified within 28 days of the competition closing. The name and home town of the winner will be published on Platform. The editor’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into. 

Want to know more about cross-examination? Gary Slapper, Visiting Professor of Law at the Open University explains it....

In court, cross-examination is where an advocate questions a witness who is part of the other side of the case. The questions cross from one side’s lawyer to the other side’s witness.

The aim of the exercise is to weaken the opponent’s case, and to help establish facts which are favourable to the side of the cross-examiner. It’s an opportunity to expose any unreliability of an opposing witness’s testimony. Cross examination can be done politely and without hostility. Sir John Mortimer QC notes that his late father (also a distinguished barrister) used to say “the art of cross-examination is not the art of examining crossly”

When a prosecuting advocate has finished questioning (called “examining”) a witness called by the prosecution, defence counsel can cross-examine that witness. Later the prosecution has the same chance to discredit the evidence of defence witnesses. In a civil case, similarly, the claimant and the defendant (usually through advocates) can cross-examine each other, and each other’s witnesses. The procedure has a long history. The noun “cross-examination” was first recorded in a case in 1729, although the technique itself is much older, appearing in one case involving a will in Norwich in about 1200. Cross-examination is an excellent method of clarifying the facts of a disputed matter. It is a serious intellectual contest fought in the threat of grave consequences. It is people at the peek of rational truth-finding.

The advocate has many advantages over the witness, like knowing the rules of evidence, and choosing the line of inquiry in cross-examination. But the advocate doesn’t always get the upper hand. A barrister in Ireland once began a cross-examination of an Irish Prelate with the words: “Am I wrong in thinking you are the most influential man, and decidedly the most influential Prelate or Potentate, in the Province of Connaught?” The witness replied: “Well, you know, they say these things, but it is in the sense that they would say that you are the very light of the Bar of Ireland: these are children’s compliments”

Cross examination can involve counsel taking a witness through a sequence of propositions he’ll have to agree with until he’s eventually cornered into agreeing with one final deadly point. But, equally, advocates sometimes pivot quickly to a riveting question. In opening the cross-examination of Frederick Seddon (who was on trial for the murder of his lodger Miss Eliza Barrow), Sir Rufus Isaacs, Attorney General, began thus:

ISAACS: Miss Barrow lived with you from July 26, 1910, to September 14, 1911?
SEDDON: Yes
ISAACS: Did you like her?

This flummoxed Seddon and he didn’t regain his composure. He could see that if he said he had liked her he’d be asked why he’d put her in a pauper’s grave, whereas if he said he hadn’t liked her he’d tilt the case further against himself. Decidedly, a killer question. Seddon was eventually executed for the murder.

One masterful cross-examination was that in 1909 by Sir Edward Carson KC (King’s Counsel) of the witness William Cadbury, director of the chocolate company. Between 1901 and 1908, Cadburys obtained half their cocoa from islands off Angola which exploited forced slave labour. Cadburys, knew about the slavery, and profited hugely from it for years but didn’t reveal it to the public. Instead, it traded on its reputation as a model employer, and the benevolent treatment of its workers at Bourneville in England. Meanwhile, people were snatched as slaves and forced to march up to a thousand miles to the plantations, and killed if they didn’t keep up. The Evening Standard published an article critical of Cadburys, and the firm sued saying it made them look like “a bunch of canting hypocrites”. In a brilliant cross-examination lasting five hours, Carson dismantled the case of William Cadbury and the firm. The final exchange was a dramatic dénouement. After hours of quizzing about how much slave blood and suffering was involved in the production of the chocolate, and the complicity of Cadbury, there was this question:

CARSON: Have you formed any estimate of the number of slaves who lost their lives in preparing your cocoa from 1901 to 1908?

That is a bit like asking “have you stopped beating your wife?” - a question which, answered either way, condemns the quizzed person. In answer to the question whether he’d quantified the suffering on which he’d sold chocolate, the director replied meekly:

CADBURY: No, no, no.

The jury found Cadburys had been libelled but awarded damages of one farthing.

Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett KC (1879-1936) was famous for maintaining that in cross-questioning an advocate should never ask a question if he didn’t already know the answer. A modern case in point was recounted by Sir Oliver Popplewell in 2003. As a young barrister defending a man charged with careless driving, Mr Popplewell was cross-examining a prosecution witness who had testified that the defendant had been speeding. The witness was repeatedly pressed to estimate the speed of the car but declined. Having satisfactorily established the witness’s incompetence in car-speed estimation, Mr Popplewell didn’t sit down but asked one final fatal question: “Why are you telling the court you cannot estimate the speed of my client’s car?” The witness’s response was calm and clear: “Because I have never seen a car go as fast as that in all my life!”

Professor Gary Slapper was Head of Law at The Open University 1997-2011. He is now Global Professor at New York University, and Director of New York University in London. He is also Visiting Professor of Law at the Open University. A new edition of his book How the Law Works is published by Routledge.

Find oure more:

• Follow Gary on Twitter
• Study Law at the OU

 

In his latest update Gary Slapper, Visiting Professor of Law at The Open University, looks at cases brought to court over the ownership of animals....

Litigation over the ownership of a cat has just ended because a key witness who was supposed to give evidence, a dog called Hamish, has died.

Della Macdonald, in a dispute with another woman about who owned the cat, had planned to call her pet dog Hamish as a witness at Stornoway Sheriff Court on the Isle of Lewis.

Ms Macdonald claimed that when the court saw the affection the cat showed to Hamish in court, by snuggling up to him, it would be clear that the fought-over feline was hers.

The story began in 2010 when Nicola Dempster, a 19-year old hotel chef from the Western Isles off Scotland, purchased a kitten. She named him Smudge and cared affectionately for him but after six months he got lost and disappeared.

Ms Dempster searched all Smudge’s favourite haunts, posted a Facebook appeal and reported him missing to the Cats Protection Society. All of that was, though, to no avail.

Meanwhile, Smudge had turned up in a pitiful state outside the door of Della Macdonald. She nourished the black and white stray back to health and named him Oscar.

Later, Ms Dempster was euphoric to spot ‘Smudge’ at a roundabout and took him home.

Police were summoned to an explosive altercation when Ms Macdonald discovered where ‘Oscar’ had been taken.

Ms Macdonald’s legal action to reclaim ‘Oscar’ has now been discontinued as her star witness, Hamish the dog, has died and Ms Macdonald has become ill. The judge, Sheriff David Sutherland, decreed that the cat should remain with the original owner, Miss Dempster.

There are odd precedents of cases in which people have disputed the ownership of pets. In 2009 in Florida, two women fought a civil case over a 13-year old African Grey parrot.

For ten years, Angela Colicheski from Florida had loved her parrot Tequila. Then, one day he flew away over her garden fence. Three years later, she was sitting in a local Dunkin Donuts chatting to Sarita Lytell, whom she’d just met, when they started to talk about parrots. Lytell said she had one called Lucky that she had found three years earlier.

It became evident that he was the one Colicheski had lost but Lytell refused to return him. Tequila didn’t give sworn testimony but he did give squawk testimony. As soon as he was brought into court and saw his previous owner he emitted what witnesses said was a loud call of recognition. The court ruled he was the personal property of Ms Colicheski.

In 2006 in Argentina, in litigation between Jorge Machado and Rio Vega, the court ruled that a parrot called Pepo, which each man claimed was his, should be imprisoned until it uttered the name of its owner. Five days later, it squawked “Jorge” and sang the anthem of his owner’s favourite football team – San Lorenzo. Game over. Mr Vega lost.

Dogs have given testimony in earlier cases. In 1987, a border collie called Tetter appeared in a constructive dismissal case in Hampshire. It became relevant to know whether Tetter, who had been the subject of wrathful outbursts of the employer in the case, was well behaved. Tetter was called to give evidence and responded correctly when given such instructions as “sit” and “up”. His evidence assisted the claimant’s case.

In 1994, a robbery conviction of two men was secured with the assistance of Ben, an Alsatian tracker dog. On appeal, the Lord Chief Justice said that evidence about a dog’s behaviour was admissible provided jurors were warned that “the dog may not always be reliable and cannot be cross-examined.”

Professor Gary Slapper was Head of Law at The Open University 1997-2011. He is now Global Professor at New York University, and Director of New York University in London. He is also Visiting Professor of Law at the Open University. His latest book More Weird Cases is published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill

You can follow him on Twitter @garyslapper


 

As part of an expert blog, OU Visiting Research Fellow, Peter Sommer makes  three predictions for 2012 related to issues around digital evidence.

This blog brings together all the responses to the call for predictions of developments in 2012 and beyond, whether affecting IT law, IP, data protection, e-disclosure, law firm technology or any number of vaguely related developments. Read the blog on SCL - The IT Law Community.