Yesterday, for those of you who don’t do “Twitter”, was somewhat surreal. So much so that I tweeted a couple of quotes from Alice (Wonderland and Looking Glass) which summed up our day:
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. ” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Both, in their own ways, speak to the head-desk-banging, experience of appealing decisions of the LSC.
This morning I found myself writing this, in a CDS 7 Enhancement argument:
The latter* is telling and it would be legitimate, on assessment, for this to be weighed against the AOs own experience. Has the AO come across these combined circumstances in the “generality of proceedings?”
Which got me to thinking – the poor sod has probably no idea as to what is “out of the ordinary” in the “generality of Criminal proceedings”, even from an assessment point of view. (If I am right s/he probably has no scope for real initiative in any event).
And so the precisely defined words of Contract, CBAM and CRIMLA become “just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
*the firm have never experienced the particular circumstances of this case in 25 years of practice
