IN his letter published in your newspaper on August 17, 2010, Mr. Charles Ramson has studiously shrunk from responding to the substantive matters I raised in my earlier letter. The Leader of the Bar has instead chosen to employ thesaurusian invectives to denigrate a junior member of the Bar with a deluded suggestion that I run the risk of donning the badge of slavery.
I am not usually inclined to respond to puerile challenges lobbed at me. However, I feel compelled to take up the gauntlet on this occasion since the “judicial democracy that is alive and well in our dear land” is in jeopardy of expiring when our Attorney-General suffers from amnesia.
Charles Ramson, in his customary egocentric style, recounts his countless successes in the Appellate Court. In the course of his research to frame his ‘limpid’ arguments, he must have encountered several reported cases in which judicial use was made of the epithet “preposterous”. Despite this, and in a desperate attempt to upbraid our Court of Appeal for what he considers the intemperate use of that epithet in describing his submissions, he challenges me to identify by research any Case Report from an established Court system worthy of serious consideration in which the epithet “preposterous” is used.
The England and Wales Court of Appeal indisputably measures up to the lofty standard set by Mr Ramson. In Matin v. Matin (1998) EWCA Civ, 374, the judgement of that Court was delivered by Lord Justice Thorpe. In the course of the judgement, His Lordship stated: “The plain fact is that the suggestion that Judge Tibber disposed of the defended divorce proceedings without hearing oral evidence from the wife is quite simply preposterous and it is only the absence of a record from the Court itself that has enabled Mr. Matin to advance such a preposterous submission”.
I commend to the Attorney-General the well-appointed facilities at the library below his Chambers, greater resort to which will “reverse the mediocrity of the mindless.” I do not propose to make any further intervention in this matter. Mr. Ramson will have to await another epistolary conduit through which to vent his spleen on the “faceless bureaucrats” who seem to be haunting him.