Who can resist being provided with a soapbox? The Property Chronicle asked whether, as a partner in a reasonably sized London law firm, I would reveal some of the black arts of solicitors, the most famously egregious being hourly billing and my favourite being using Latin phrases. But first, a rather more pressing and important subject.
Albeit a long time ago, at law school I was taught that making things generally demanding or inconvenient for police was generally the mark of a healthy society and that a society that made life too easy for the police tended to become a ‘police state’. I write this article on 5 November, only a few hours after the new 28-day covid lockdown restrictions came into force in England. Perhaps by the time you read this piece 2 December will have arrived and the restrictions will have faded away.
As a lawyer with more than 30 years’ experience, I thought it would be a good test of my skills to see how long it might take me to find, read and understand that relevant legislation. It might also be in my economic self-interest to do so… of which more later. Instinct suggested that popping down to a local branch of HMSO to buy a paper version might, of itself, involve a breach of the law. Therefore, like many others, I suspect, I turned to my good friend, Mr Google.
At law school I was taught that a society
that made life too easy for the police
tended to become a ‘police state’
As so often with matters of the law, Mr Google is very good at finding hundreds of websites that proffer guidance, advice and/or commentary, but is not terribly helpful in finding the law. Indeed, if you go on the government’s own covid websites, you find a similar morass, but nothing telling you where the law may be found.
