Jolyon Maugham took time out of his busy schedule losing cases today to speak about “social justice” at the Open University’s Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. I picked up on some of Jolyon’s definitely-not-personal analysis of the legal system:
“The way our system allocates costs means that if you litigate and you lose you will generally pay the winner’s costs – so even if you have lawyers acting for free you can often not fight because if you lose you face enormous financial penalty, even bankruptcy. This critical feature of the law, the adverse cost regime, is a profound shortcoming in a thing whose main purpose is to be a safeguard.“
Jolyon is speaking from experience: the Good Law Project did not win a single case in 2023. Not that he bore the costs personally – he collected £623,895 from his hapless fans that years. Meanwhile, the government has cashed in £539,766 in legal costs from the Good Law Project since 2017 and given up only £63,738. And the gravy train keeps going: the Good Law Project is now hoovering up thousands in donations for campaigns that have already been lost…
Bizarrely the fox-beater then goes on to seemingly blame the long-standing principle of costs following the event on… a bland committee of lawyers put together to supervise a 1997 law that simplified legal rules:
“[It] is crafted by a committee, The Civil Procedure Rule Committee, who we looked at a couple of days ago and we believe to be entirely white and overwhelmingly Oxbridge-educated.“
Typical fare for a woke Durham graduate…
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