Everyone loves a loopy, mad-as-a-bag-of-frogs story about the law.
Collector-in-chief of legal bizarreness and entertaining ephemera is the appropriately-named Gary Slapper, a law professor and director of the law department at the UK’s Open University, as well as being a regular columnist for The Times newspaper for the best part of the last two decades.
More Weird Cases is the latest in the Weird Cases series and the book’s publishers maintain that it boasts some truly astonishing stories from courtrooms around the world. With the charming air of a slightly cooky professor himself, the OU’s man delves into bizarre disputes and irregularities that have cropped up since the first volume of Weird Cases was published in 2009.
He goes above and beyond the level of plain odd to find some sensational cases that are downright hard to believe.
Take, for example, the story of a man caught with a significant amount of marijuana who pleaded in defence that the only reason he possessed the drug was to use it for de-worming his ducks. (On the other hand, perhaps that actually works, keeping the ducks happy on several levels.)
Then there is the instance of a court that – some might suggest unreasonably – would not recognise that ‘being a cat’ was an acceptable reason to be excused from serving on a jury. Family lawyers will also be intrigued by the case of a husband who was granted a divorce because his wife had simply admitted to thinking about having sex with another man.
Collector-in-chief of legal bizarreness and entertaining ephemera is the appropriately-named Gary Slapper, a law professor and director of the law department at the UK’s Open University, as well as being a regular columnist for The Times newspaper for the best part of the last two decades.
More Weird Cases is the latest in the Weird Cases series and the book’s publishers maintain that it boasts some truly astonishing stories from courtrooms around the world. With the charming air of a slightly cooky professor himself, the OU’s man delves into bizarre disputes and irregularities that have cropped up since the first volume of Weird Cases was published in 2009.
He goes above and beyond the level of plain odd to find some sensational cases that are downright hard to believe.
Take, for example, the story of a man caught with a significant amount of marijuana who pleaded in defence that the only reason he possessed the drug was to use it for de-worming his ducks. (On the other hand, perhaps that actually works, keeping the ducks happy on several levels.)
Then there is the instance of a court that – some might suggest unreasonably – would not recognise that ‘being a cat’ was an acceptable reason to be excused from serving on a jury. Family lawyers will also be intrigued by the case of a husband who was granted a divorce because his wife had simply admitted to thinking about having sex with another man.
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