A request for manors; how a solicitor won the Grand National and the Gay news blasphemous libel case from the Gazette archives this week.

The Law Society’s Gazette, April 1929

Manors and manorial documents

In the Law Society's Gazette... appeared letters from the Master of the Rolls, expressing hopes that members of the Society and others who may be in a position to supply information concerning any manors, whether existing or now extinct, would send him particulars of such manors and the names and addresses of Lords and Stewards.

The Law Society’s Gazette, April 1959

Notes of the Month by The Editor

On 23 December last there died a solicitor who did something that no other solicitor and previous few other people have ever done. His name was William Parker Dutton, and on 31 March 1928, he rode the winner of the Grand National. (It was a memorable month for Mr Dutton for on March 1 he was admitted as a solicitor.) The immortal horse that he rode, Tipperary Tim, started at odds of 100 to 1 against.

The Law Society’s Gazette, April 1979

Why censorship is the ultimate blasphemy

An invitation was recently issued for interested parties to express views for the Law Commission's consideration on the outcome of R v Lemon, the Gay News case, which was eventually the subject of a House of Lords decision. This dismissed... the appeal by the editors and publishers of Gay News against their convictions (by a jury majority of 10 to two) for publishing blasphemous libels.

As things stand it would of course be illegal to inflict even on lawyers an opportunity to see what were the awful verses to illustrate a limit beyond which it would be more certainly illegal for a poet, however innocent of an intention to blaspheme, to go. Is it the mark of a civilised legal system to produce so Gilbertian a result?