“Does the law have a sense of humour?” Justice Sachs once asked in Laugh It Off Promotions CC v SAB International (Finance) BV t/a Sabmark International and Another.
Sometimes we delve so deep into the law that we see it as a logical, impartial and objective behemoth immune to human bias and prejudice. Whether it is or not is debatable, what is more apparent though is that its proper operation requires the intervention of human beings. And with those human beings, comes human emotion, including as I shall endeavour to show below, humour. Here are some of the more humorous quotes from judgments.
“This is a case about a baboon. By all accounts, until it apparently met an untimely end, the baboon behaved impeccably.” – Macrae v State (93/2013) [2014] ZASCA 37 at para 1.
“No one hearing this accusation understands intellectual property owners to be saying that infringers are nautical cutthroats with eyepatches and peg legs who board galleons to plunder cargo. In context, all these terms are nonactionable “rhetorical hyperbole”. The parties are advised to chill.” – Mattel, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc. 296 F.3d 894 at 908.
“If one assumes, however, that the PGA TOUR has some legal obligation to play classic, Platonic golf—and if one assumes the correctness of all the other wrong turns the Court has made to get to this point—then we Justices must confront what is indeed an awesome responsibility. . . to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer? The answer, we learn, is yes. The Court ultimately concludes, and it will henceforth be the Law of the Land, that walking is not a ‘fundamental’ aspect of golf.” – PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin 532 U.S. 661, 121 S.Ct. 1879 at 1902.
“The problem of whether it is constitutionally permissible to prohibit the combination of tipples and nipples has divided judicial minds in many open and democratic societies.” – Phillips & Another v Director of Public Prosecutions & Others 2003 (4) BCLR 357 (CC) at para 64.
“As stated by the representative of the respondent, the competition between Kenny and Spenny is ridiculous, stupid, bizarre and immature. The theme of this particular episode is “Who can annoy most people”. Although many people were probably annoyed when seeing these words on the banner, they would have realised that this is part of the ridiculous, stupid, bizarre and immature competition between these infantile actors.” – Schutte v MultiChoice Channel 126 [2010] JOL 25572 (BCCSA) at para 6.
“Before proceeding further, the Court notes that this case involves two extremely likable lawyers, who have together delivered some of the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway into Galveston, an effort which leads the Court to surmise but one plausible explanation. Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact – complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words – to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed.” – Bradshaw v. Unity Marine Corporation Inc, 147 F.Supp.2d 668 at 670.
“I am aware of the argument that an able, alert, ever-diligent lawyer could have, had he tried hard enough, discovered that the Government had appealed-even in the closing hours of the sixtieth day. I do not doubt that had Bertman’s counsel been Superman, his X-ray eyes would have told him that a notice of appeal was being filed blocks away in the courthouse, or had he been a lawyer with no clients but Bertman he could have spent the sixtieth day hovering at the clerk’s office to see whether the Government would file a notice of appeal. But Bertman’s counsel (so far as the record shows) is not Superman, nor should the law expect him to be.” – Bertman v. J. A. Kirsch Co. 377 U.S. 995, 84 S.Ct. 1913 (Mem) at 1914.
“To assert that unhesitant and categorical identification by four witnesses who viewed the killer, close-up and with the sun high in the sky, would not eliminate reasonable doubt if it were based only on facial characteristics, and not on height and build, is quite simply absurd. Facial features are the primary means by which human beings recognize one another. That is why police departments distribute ‘mug’ shots of wanted felons, rather than Ivy-League-type posture pictures; it is why bank robbers wear stockings over their faces instead of floor-length capes over their shoulders; it is why the Lone Ranger wears a mask instead of a poncho; and it is why a criminal defense lawyer who seeks to destroy an identifying witness by asking “You admit that you saw only the killer’s face?” will be laughed out of the courtroom.” – Kyles v. Whitley 514 U.S. 419, 115 S.Ct. 1555 at 1581.
“Paging Dr. Freud. Paging Dr. Freud. This is yet another case that reveals the ineffectiveness of Family Court in a bitter custody/access dispute, where the parties require therapeutic intervention rather than legal attention. Here, a husband and wife have been marinating in a mutual hatred so intense as to surely amount to a personality disorder requiring treatment.” – Bruni v. Bruni 2010 CarswellOnt 8992 at paras 1-2.
And finally some spectacular footnotes in a Judgment by Justice Fergus O’Donnell in R. v. Duncan 2012 CarswellOnt 17266:
FN1 “I should point out that Mr. Duncan preferred not to be called Mr. Duncan but rather Matthew. There was some mumbo-jumbo about the natural person and the administrator and that one of them might have been Mr. Duncan and one might have been Matthew and one, but not both, of them might have been the person speaking to me in court (while seated). However, when I read the ‘affidavit of truth’ presented to me by Mr. Duncan, I noticed that it had been sworn by someone whose first name was clearly ‘Matthew’ and whose second name looked very much like ‘Duncan’ and certainly began with a ‘D’ and a ‘u’. Since Mr. Duncan agreed that the affidavit had been sworn by him and accepted my proposition that there is no ‘D’ and no ‘u’ in the name Matthew, I continued to refer to him as Mr. Duncan through the proceedings.”
FN2 “For readers under the age of thirty or so, the ‘typewriter’ was a mechanical device used for creating documents that pre-dated the computer and lacked some of the computer’s more annoying characteristics, in particular the computer’s facilitation of ‘cutting and pasting’, which is undoubtedly one of the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse and which has cost many trees their lives and many lawyers and judges their eyesight.”
FN4. “The ‘internet’, also known as the ‘world-wide web’ is a bi-polar electronic Leviathan that has erupted on the world scene in the past two decades. In its benevolent manifestations, it has enormously increased and expedited access to useful information of all sorts, increased global awareness of myriad events, facilitated family and commercial communication across national boundaries in the blink of an eye and helped topple dictators; it is probably fair to say that its advent is of no less significance than the invention of the printing press. However, just as the printing press has been put to odious use from time to time, the internet has its own Jekyll and Hyde nature: it is a near certainty that future generations will look back at these decades, obsessed as we are with the twin behemoths of ‘reality’ television and the ‘ooh, look at me, I must tell the world what I had for breakfast’ narcissism of social media and at the billions of hours thus lost to a near psychotropic electronic escape from any useful pursuit and wonder if Aldous Huxley only got a few details wrong in Brave New World. For the purposes of this case, the relevance of the internet is its un-policed ‘garbage in/garbage out’ potential and its free-market-of-ideas potential to lure in otherwise pleasant and unsuspecting folk with all manner of absurdity and silliness.”
FN5. “Lest anyone misunderstand me, this is by no means intended to compare Mr. Duncan to a monkey. As I have noted, Mr. Duncan seemed a decent fellow who expressed himself well (other than when rambling a bit too long about jurisdiction, as noted herein) and whose principal shortcomings appeared to be too much free time with internet access and too little discernment in whose example he followed. The reference to monkeys with typewriters is intended solely to point out that technological ‘advances’ are sometimes used to such ends that one wonders if perhaps the Luddites didn’t have a point.”
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