Delegates at Inner Temple last week must have been wondering what they had let themselves in for when Lord Justice Moses began the annual law reform lecture.

He said: ‘I shall speak to you at length; I cannot even say how long I will be. There will be few intervals; about once every one-and-a-half hours if you are lucky, or two hours. I cannot say how long this will last, certainly more than a day, so please do not believe you can make any sensible arrangements for the rest of the week… You cannot interrupt or ask questions while I am speaking. To those of you who are not lawyers, or practise only in the commercial court, if that is not tautology, I shall be speaking in a language entirely foreign to you… Before I finish my lecture it would be as well if you did not discuss it among yourselves because you will not, until I finish, have learnt all I wish to teach nor had the opportunity to appreciate my objective. Please, if I haven’t finished today do not discuss it with anyone else when you get home tonight.’

Moses was, of course, making a point about jury trials, and in particular the way trial judges go about summing up, adding cuttingly that ‘we must surely have grown out of the belief that any good can be achieved by the ritual incantation of obscure utterance’. He noted wryly that when jurors inevitably fail to recall all that was said and ask the bench for a reminder, some judges are annoyed, while others are ‘merely hurt, and respond in a tone of injured affront, rather as the prime minister of Italy might if you ask him the rules of bunga-bunga’. Any readers unsure as to precisely what bunga-bunga is are recommended to visit their nearest dictionary, post-haste.