Back at the coal face of justice, Obiter has long suspected that the road to hell leads through an overspill court. We took that road this week in venturing to the top floor of the Royal Courts of Justice, where the ambient temperature would not have inconvenienced an Arctic fox. The actual hearing, which was packed with enough lawyers to staff a reasonably sized firm, was going on elsewhere.

As usual, counsel’s opening speeches were accompanied by someone rubbing a sweet wrapper on the microphone – while the judges’ own mics were plainly not designed to accomplish anything so vulgar as amplification. It got worse. Just as the sound started coming through, the screen froze then cut off, returning later. We hope that whatever we missed wasn’t important.

A hat tip to the techies at least. Thanks goes to whoever managed to fix things to an extent that we could hear the first decision made by the judges. An achievement, of sorts.

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