What is the origin of this legal quote? &quot;... In Barnsley, m&#39;lud, they speak of little else.&quot; In legal circles this quote, in one form or another, has passed into legend: Judge: Your client is no doubt aware that Vigilantibus, et not dormientibus, jura subveniunt? Lawyer: In Barnsley, m'lud, they speak of little else. What is the origin of this quote? Or is it entirely apocryphal?
This is not a quote, per se, rather, it is a meme. It is attributed to Gilbert Gray, and according to The Independent Saturday 7 March 1998 was originally: "I take it, Mr Gray, that your client is familiar with the maxim: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" "Indeed my lord, responded the QC drily. "In Barnsley they speak of little else." However, according to the Fortune Newsletter two years later, it was attributed to a different barrister, Charles Gray, who is reported to have recounted a story about a barrister in Reading who was asked by the judge whether his client was aware of the principle of Res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself), to which the barrister replied: "In the Irish village from which my client comes, M'Lud, they speak of little else". It is also attributed in 2005 to some unnamed judge referring to sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas. As Tim Lymington notes, the Irish res ipsa loquitur version is attributed to Marshal Hall apparently was on the air in the BBC production The Trials of Marshall Hall originally from 1996, and is cited in a recent book review. The book review and Wiki versions of that statement differ slightly in the wording of the text, to wit Wiki: "Is your client not familiar with the maxim res ipsa loquitur?” replied, "My lord, on the remote hillside in County Donegal where my client hails from they talk of little else." vs. book review Judge: “Mr Marshall Hall, is your client familiar with the doctrine res ipsa loquitur? Marshall: “My Lord, in the remote hills of County Donegal from where my client hails they speak of little else.” Without a copy of the book, I can't say whether the reviewer mis-copied the quote, but at least we can believe that the linked quote represents the review author's wording. There is a much earlier work on the life of Marshall Hall, Marjoribanks, Edward For the Defence. The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall K.C. (The MacMillan Company, New York, 1929), which might contain the quote in question. At this point, I am inclined to take the Hall res ipsa loquitur quote as being original and the others as being derivative works.
For Mr. Petersen, the questions in general should have been elementary. The fact he did not know them is actually quite deplorable. To your questions specifically: Should Mr. Petersen, as a Juris Doctor, know of those things in his sleep? This is the wrong question. The question is: should an individual who has accepted a nomination to serve as a federal judge on the U.S. District Court know of those things in his/her sleep? The answer is unequivocally yes. One could almost argue - one would likely be scoffed at, but one could - that an appointment to a higher court, the U.S. Circuit, could get away not knowing those things 'in his/her sleep,' because appeals courts would not deal with, e.g., abstention doctrines or whether to admit expert scientific testimony, as often as a trial court does. Simply put, lawyers should at least have heard of those things (he looked/sounded absolutely dumbfounded at the words that were being said to him), litigators should know them, and federal trial court judges absolutely need to know those things to do the job. Is his excuse valid when he says that he has no background in the field(s) (he mentioned litigation once) the terms are corresponding to? If he was just some lawyer talking to some guy at a bar, sure, totally valid. If someone is a corporate M&amp;A or project finance attorney, sure, don't expect him to win any trial court vocabulary contests. However, when sitting before a panel of U.S. Senators carrying out their Constitutional duties of "advice and consent" on presidential appointments, not knowing those things can, should, and indeed did end in complete humiliation for the person ignorant enough to try and go through with that. I'm sure his hearing was scheduled some time in advance. The fact he obviously made zero attempt to know anything is actually insulting to everyone involved. For context, I wrote a motion in limine at my first internship. If I live to be 1,000 and never step foot in a court room, I'll still be able to say more about a motion in limine than "I would probably not be able to give you a good definition right here at the table."
The earliest mention of the principle that I can find is in Rolston v Secretary of State for Northern Ireland [1975] NI 195, where the matter of compensation for the widow of a police officer murdered in Northern Ireland arose. I am sure there are earlier cases that express the same principle in different terms, however. It is a broad principle that applies to most areas of civil law, and I cannot find an original source for it. I imagine that it is simply &quot;received wisdom&quot; that has been repeated long enough to become a cornerstone of the law of restitution in England and Wales. There is currently no statutory basis for the principle so I cannot cite any relevant Acts of Parliament either.
The use of the word counsel for barristers has a long history. It was used in England before the modern legal profession developed. Baker, Counsellors and barristers: an historical study (1969) traces homo consiliarius back to the 13th century plea rolls: The sum of [a pleader or counsellor's] functions may be termed &quot;counselling&quot; in its widest sense, and the subject of the present study must be what the plea rolls call homo consiliarius, the counsellor. Even this compendious name can mislead. It eventually became synonymous with &quot;barrister,&quot; in the sense of &quot;jurisconsult,&quot; while some of the counselling came in fact to be done by attorneys and solicitors. Sense 8(a) of counsel (n.) in the OED (&quot;A body of legal advisers, engaged in the direction or conduct of a cause&quot;) is dated back to the Confessio Amantis (1393): Help, that I hadde counseil here Upon the trouthe of my matere. Sense 8(b) (&quot;A single legal adviser; a counsellor-at-law, advocate, or barrister&quot;) is first quoted in 1709, but seems also to cover sense 8(a)'s quotation of Greene's coney-catching pamphlets (1591), by distinguishing between counsel and attorney: [He] hath his mind so full of cares to see his counsell and to plie his Atorney. As barristers came to replace the serjeants at law, the association of counsel with barristers may have become entrenched with the appointment of Sir Francis Bacon as the first King's Counsel (1603). According to Holdsworth, A history of English law (1924), vol 6, p 472: It soon became clear that the king's attorney and solicitor could not by themselves do all the work which their office imposed upon them. It is to this cause that we must ascribe the rise of a body of &quot;king's learned counsel,&quot; who are the ancestors of our modern king's counsel. It would seem from D'Ewes that a body of persons so designated was known at the very beginning of Elizabeth's reign [1558 – 1603].
I think you should take &quot;the whole truth&quot; as simply short for &quot;all the truth known to the witness, within the limits of the rules of evidence as applied by the judge.&quot; and take &quot;nothing but the truth&quot; to mean &quot;no intentionally false statements included&quot;. I cannot be sure, but I suspect the response in the question would not be accepted, and if persisted in, might well lead to your being found in contempt of court. I would add that legal proceedings are absolutely full of symbolic or metaphorical things which are not to be taken literally, but as symbols for truths, or as historical vestiges of earlier realities. For example, in the US, criminal cases are normally known by a name such as &quot;the people of the State of Franklin vs R. Roe&quot;, and in the UK as &quot;The crown against R. Roe&quot; or 'Regina v R. Roe&quot;. Now neither the whole mass of the people nor the UK monarch has approved or brought any such case. It is has been brought on their behalf by the prosecutor. The defense may not argue that the people in general, or the Queen, would not have approved the case. (Nor can the people or the Queen object with any effect.) A US Judge is addressed as &quot;Your Honor&quot;. No one assess or argues whether a particular judge is in fact honorable, although in some cases it might be doubted. (When Justice Chase was impeached, his trial was presided over by then-vice President Aaron Burr. A sarcastic newspaper article commented &quot;It is usual to arraign the murderer before the Judge. In this case the reverse procedure was followed.&quot; A reference to Burr's having killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.) The vary names &quot;Roe&quot; and &quot;Doe&quot;, commonly used for unknown legal parties, are a remnant of a piece of legal fiction once known as &quot;common recovery&quot;. When a person wanted a quick trial of ownership of a plot of land, he filed a trespass action, alleging that he had rented the land to John Doe, but that Richard Roe, claiming under a lease from the other actual party, had ejected Doe with &quot;force and arms&quot;. The defendant was not allowed to contest the existence of Doe or Roe, or the use of &quot;force and arms&quot;, but only the actual land ownership. Until fairly recently affidavits often began &quot;Now Comes J Smith, who deposes and says...&quot;, this being a remnant of the long-ago time when Smith would have actually come before a court to give his testimony. Much of the formal ceremonial of court procedures is not meant to be taken too literally, but as a symbol or metaphor.
There's no law as such; it's just an age-old mark of respect that a visiting Royal not sit on your throne. The Queen has encountered other royal families so it makes sense that she'd know this tradition, and was likely just being humorous on the Game of Thrones set. That or she decided the Iron Throne didn't look very comfy!
The saying &quot;non omne quod licet honestum est&quot; refers to dishonesty that is not punishable by law. Laws purportedly prohibits or penalizes only the dishonesty which tends to --or does-- disrupt peace and order. An example of legally harmless dishonesty is a scenario where you tell your neighbor his story is entertaining even though you think it is boring. By contrast, perjury is an example of harmful and punishable dishonesty because it tends to hinder the ascertainment of the truth and consequently the administration of justice. The meaning of &quot;Male nostro iure uti non debemus&quot; is that one should refrain from abusing his rights. Strictly speaking, the expression contradicts itself since abuse and right have opposite connotations: One's exercise of his right implies that he has not exceeded the scope thereof, whence it cannot be said that the person abused his right. In reality the expression refers to a person's acts or conduct which knowingly depart from the purpose for which the right was devised. The element of &quot;knowingly&quot; implies person's dishonesty insofar as he made an illegitimate use of his right. Note that two or more of the phrases you list have misspellings or are incomplete, which might be preventing you from finding their meaning. For instance, &quot;uti&quot; is missing in your post. Also the first phrase should read generationes, not generations.
This is one of the things Martha Stewart was convicted of. 18 USC 1001 is the US federal law requiring truthfulness. That statute forbids you to falsify, conceal, or cover up a material fact. One limitation on how broad this law is, is that it has to be a matter "within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States". If your neighbor is an FBI agent and he asks if you're the one who broke his window, and you lie, that's not a federal matter. Another limitation is that the lying has to be material. The essential part of the law is subsection (a). Subsection (b) then states an exception: (b) Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party’s counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding. Then you also owe a lesser duty of truthfulness to the legislature. Taking note of US. v. Yermian, it is not required that the person you lie to be a federal officer. Yermian lied to his employer, who was a defense contractor, and the fact that the relevant form was submitted to the government for scrutiny is what made it a matter in federal jurisdiction. Comparing the wording of 1001 to the perjury statute, the operative expression for perjury involves statements "which he does not believe to be true", we can see that the perjury statute requires telling the literal truth (see Bronston v. US), which allows so-called lies of omission (of a particular subtype: much more could be said about that). In contrast the lying statute forbids both literally false statements and concealing of the truth. I don't have cases at my fingertips that indicate how broad your truthful answers have to be, for example if you think the FBI is trying to put away a friend and ask you about what he did on June 14, and you know that he did a bad thing on June 13, would it be lying in the relevant sense to conceal that fact which they didn't ask about. [ADDENDUM] A session of perusing cases has led to a tiny bit of further information. A literal reading of the statute says that you are in violation of the law if you falsify a fact (sloppy epistemology, unless it refers just to altering records and evidence), or conceal a fact, and the courts recognise this as a fundamental division. As for falsifying, the way that has been applied is to refer to cases where the accused makes a statement which asserts something that he knows to be untrue. Thus, saying "No" to a question when the truth is "Yes" is a violation. A propos concealment, in US v. Diogo 320 F.2d 898 the court states that False representations, like common law perjury, require proof of actual falsity; concealment requires proof of wilful nondisclosure by means of a 'trick, scheme or device.' This case is pre-Bronston so there is mixing of concepts from perjury law and lying law, which would not happen now, but we can steering clear of their perjury citations. The crucial fact is that accused(s) were technically married in New York, for immigration purposes, and they were accused of a 1001 violation for having indicated that they were married. Part of the government's case was that such a marriage is not valid, and the court rejected that conclusion. The government's second prong was to maintain that the court "should affirm appellant's convictions on a theory of concealment", and this too the court rejected, saying "proof of their ulterior motives in marriage would not be tantamount to proof of willful and knowing concealment of these material facts". What they said on the forms was literally true, and they did not have a duty to volunteer information that they probably knew the government was interested in. Contrarily in a later case, US v. Zalman 870 F.2d 1047 we are told that the underlying purpose of a marriage is a material fact which bears upon the validity of the marriage, and that any false or fraudulent misrepresentation regarding the actual purpose of a marriage in order to gain status as a resident of the United States can be punished under 18 U.S.C.A. § 1001 so you have to be more truthful than the literal truth standard. There are also circumstances where there is an independent duty to give information, such as reporting income to the IRS. In US v. Hernando Ospina 798 F.2d 1570 the court maintained It is clear that in order to support a section 1001 concealment conviction there must be a legal duty to disclose the facts the defendant was convicted of concealing citing US v. Tobon-Builes 706 F.2d 1092, where again there was a legal duty to report "existence, origin, and transfer of approximately $185,200 in cash". In other words, it is not clear what information you are allowed to not volunteer when asked a question in a federal matter.