Last week you quoted the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, as saying words to the effect that 'solicitors taking far-fetched and impractical points under the Human Rights Act will find little tolerance amongst the judiciary'.In the Benchmarks article in the same issue about the Act and the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR), Judge Stephen Girlis quoted Lord Woolf as making specific reference to challenges to the CPR under the Act: 'It is highly undesirable for the consideration of issues to be made more complex by the injection of article 6 (right to a fair trial) arguments and it is to be hoped that judges will be robust in resisting such arguments (see [2000] Gazette, 8 June, 51).Let me get this right.

The judge who was largely responsible for drafting the rules under which trials are conducted has impliedly threatened lawyers that we will be in trouble if we take improper points when seeking to challenge his rules.

Who is to be the judge of what is proper? Ultimately, if we follow the chain of appeal, it is Lord Woolf himself.This somewhat unpalatable fact was evident even before the 'threat' was issued but the making of it only reinforces the position.

Obviously we should not raise pointless arguments, but there will be times when we will have proper issues to raise.We are in the position of having a senior judge, who is the ultimate authority for a challenge to his own rules, threatening lawyers if they dare to challenge them.I do not believe that we can be as relaxed about human rights as Lord Woolf suggests.Ian Cross, Veale Wasbrough, Bristol