Tag Archive for 'Litigant-in-person'

And the 23rd Claim…

Published
by
NL
on 1 September 2008
in Housing law
. 4 Comments

As a tale of vexatious litigants, HM Attorney General v Ford & Anor [2008] EWHC 2066 (Admin) has it all. Mysterious changes of identity, admitted perjury, repeated applications for judicial review of refusals to give permission to appeal, and appeals of refusals, all resulting from a claim for leasehold enfranchisement by three leasehold tenants.

Two years after the leasehold enfranchisement vesting order against an absentee landlord, David Sayers, in 2001, a Mr (sometimes Captain) Daniel Ford and Mrs Liubov Ford appeared from abroad and applied to have the order set aside, claiming to have obtained the title by adverse possession some years before and had built a garage (the ‘coach house’) on the property. The application was dismissed, permission to appeal on paper refused, then refused again in oral application. In this hearing Mr Ford stated that his previous statement was knowingly false and that he was, in fact, David Sayers.

After a series of failed appeals on the costs order resulting from this proceeding, the Fords then applied to have the LVT proceedings on valuing the property discontinued on the basis that he was now shown to be the legal owner. In this Mr Ford claimed he hadn’t said he was David Sayers before because he didn’t think he could prove that he was using that name. This application was refused, after a three day hearing.

A possession claim was brought against the Fords for part of the wider property that they were occupying, but not the Coach House parcel, which remained registered to David Sayers. The Ford’s application to strike out was refused, they sought to appeal, with permission refused by the High Court and Court of Appeal. The interim injunction orders against them also faced failed appeal applications to High Court and Court of Appeal. At a eight day possession hearing, where the Fords claimed over 12 years adverse possession, a possession order was made, with Mr Ford’s evidence described as untruthful in many parts.  The Fords were refused permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal.

Committal proceedings for non-compliance followed. 28 days in prison were followed by a further 42 days, after an unsuccessful appeal to the full Court of Appeal. The Fords had simply returned to the property and told the Court of Appeal they had no intention of relinquishing it.

There followed a small success for the Fords in judicial review of the LVT valuation of the property, which included the specific Coach House lane, which was actually under a separate title number and still owned by ‘David Sayers’. The Fords then attempted to stay the LVT proceedings for a further flurry of applications, appeals and JR applications, including struck out attempts to reopen the intial case, JR applications against the County Court for dismissing yet another application to set aside the possession order and so forth, just about all of which were taken to application for permission to the Court of Appeal (all refused). The Fords’ other limited success was against the police for the conduct of the execution of the warrant of possession.

Not even bankruptcy, brought about by Lambeth, stopped the Fords. A flurry of attempts to overturn the order, with allegations of conspiracy between Lambeth, the tenants and the Attorney General, followed.

The Official Receiver discontinued all the outstanding proceedings. The Fords either sought Judicial Review of those decisions  to discontinue or attempted to pursue proceedings independently. All the claims were dismissed or struck out, permissions to appeal refused.

Meanwhile the tenants waited, and still wait on for the seven year old vesting order to finally bear fruit.

The Fords resisted the Attorney General’s application to have them declared vexatious litigants, arguing that where they had lost their cases this was:

due to judicial bias or disfavour against litigants in person, who are seen as a nuisance to the court system, and who are not given proper attention by the courts, and therefore do not receive proper justice.

The Court of Appeal saluted Mrs Ford, the principal advocate for the Fords, for her ‘courage and persistence’, noted their two limited successes and declared them vexatious litigants under section 42 of the Supreme Court Act 1981, requiring permission of a High Court judge to bring any further proceedings.

The hopeful LiP

Published
by
NL
on 29 February 2008
in whatever
. 1 Comment

Although the energy to do proper case comments has deserted me until tomorrow, I couldn’t resist this exchange, which is just about all that is reported of Bedi, R (on the application of) v London Borough of Hounslow [2007] EWHC 3311 (Admin)

  1. MR JUSTICE COLLINS: Now, Mr Bedi, as we have discussed, and for the reasons I have indicated, I am afraid I am going to have to refuse permission. As I say, you at least have the advantage that it has not cost you anything, at least not cost you anything so far as court fees and other side’s fees are concerned, and leave it to you to decide whether you wish to pursue it any further. But you can indicate, if there is any problem raised at any lower court, if you do decide to pursue any claim — and I am not saying that you have a good claim; I have not gone into that — that I have indicated that in my view quite clearly this is a matter that is not a public law claim and which should be pursued, if it is to be pursued, as an ordinary civil claim.
  2. THE CLAIMANT: Thank you, my Lord.
  3. MR JUSTICE COLLINS: All right?
  4. THE CLAIMANT: My Lord, you have mentioned I have not lost anything. I would ask your Lordship to grant me to this cost because I’m litigant in person and I believe I’m entitled to it.
  5. MR JUSTICE COLLINS: No, you are not entitled to any costs. You have not succeeded.

Green Ink and old Olivettis

Published
by
NL
on 11 February 2008
in job and whatever
. 5 Comments

With my usual and frankly uncanny ability to be a couple of days ahead of the zeitgeist, I posted on litigants-in-person a few days ago, only to see the Guardian do a feature piece on LiPs today. Granted they put a little more effort into it, and actually interviewed people and things like that, but we say pretty much the same things.

In addition, my post is much, much shorter, and so, brevity being not only a virtue but a mark of elegance, I can only pity the poor Guardian having to play catch up by substituting a modicum of effort and research for pith.

The Guardian article is actually quite an interesting piece. It cites a 2005 survey that found many that LiPs considered that:

lawyers were not necessary or not best placed to advance their interests. They saw themselves as more factually expert in their dispute and more able to manage their case than a lawyer - or they just wanted to “have their say”. Less constrained by legal notions of relevance, they could advance arguments or raise issues that a lawyer would not.

But of course, they can’t, because that is not how the Courts work. The result is, as the survey showed, that:

those who handle their own litigation make more mistakes than lawyers do - and more serious mistakes - and that the outcomes of their cases are generally worse than for those who are legally represented.

Nonetheless, their numbers are on the increase, driven by income limits on legal aid. Apparently Family matters have the largest proportion, which should come as no surprise.

There is one quote, from an Appeal Court Judge, that eloquently sums up the view of the LiP at appellate level. Forgive me quoting at length:

There is no sight more depressing than that of a litigant in person, borne down by frustration, anger and plastic bags filled with unsorted paper, staring up at the judge in the expectation of some quietus. What he wants, no court can give: some public acknowledgement and satisfaction for a deeply felt grievance, some release from the anger and misery induced by a resentment growing ever stronger as the years have passed. If only someone had listened and appreciated the hurt early on.

But by the time the litigant in person gets to court it is all too late. The time for listening has passed. The court, often faced with vituperation expressed in green ink or inadequate spacing between the lines typed on an old Olivetti, cannot hear what may have been a genuine cause for complaint because the complaint is lost in the sound and fury, and the litigant won’t listen because no one has been prepared to listen to him in the years gone by.

What is needed is not only understanding but therapy. The courts grapple with the former, but they inevitably fail to provide the latter.

This is unfair to many LiPs, who are doing it because they have to. However, the desperate and hopeless appeal, made in the conviction of the utter rightness of the cause, is the mark of the archetypal LiP, and, going by my visits to the Admin Court office or the Court of Appeal office, there are no shortage of those at present. The real question is why are they always in front of me in the queue?

The CAB at the RCJ is also mentioned in the piece. Given the number of what might be euphemistically described as ‘interesting’ calls we get from people who say that this CAB has ‘referred’ them to us, their daily work must be extraordinary.

Later on, I ended up browsing the list of vexatious litigants at the HMCS site. Now there is a documentary waiting to happen. How about:

ARNOLD, Dorothy Mignon (aka Gracie) who became a vexatious litigant on 17 December 1956

or BEBBINGTON, Ann Marjorie (aka EASTON, Ann Cholmondeley) - 31 January 1969

or O’NEILL, Thomas (aka Lord Charles Leslie Falconer of Thoronton) - 9 June 1998

The idea is going cheap…

Do it yourself

Published
by
NL
on 2 October 2007
in Housing law and job
. 0 Comments

A strong argument for not pursuing a case as a litigant in person can be found in this case. That said, hats off to the applicant for at least getting a Judicial Review hearing in person. Not least after turning up two hours late.

There is an indication that the applicant was represented at some point in the process, but it appears that she abandoned representation in order to maintain “I didn’t do it”, despite the neighbours’ statements, the Environmental Health Officer’s statement, the Noise Abatement Order, the Magistrates’ Court conviction for breach of that order, the Crown Court conviction on appeal, and the findings of the review panel meetings that the applicant failed to attend. So, she faces a mandatory possession order on her introductory tenancy.

Who says the litigant in person isn’t given a fair chance in the legal system? It looks to me like the civil courts at various levels have bent over backwards to ensure that this LiP had every chance, and in the end even took the excuse of a left-over funding certificate, (which should technically have been discharged long before, and possibly was), to avoid landing costs on the applicant.