Tag Archive for 'litigants-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.

Do you remember the first time?

Published
by
NL
on 4 February 2008
in job and law blogs and blogging
. 5 Comments

Pupil barrister Scribbler encounters a litigant-in-person in action for the first time, and he sounds like a classic of the genre, issuing against multiple defendants ’so they could come to court to explain themselves’, regardless of whether they actually had much to do with the case.

Of course, it has to be said that there are people who conduct their own cases effectively and with considerable ability, but many are on a crusade for justice, ignoring the eminently sensible cautions set out by Jacquig at Bloody Relations (for family cases, but the general principles apply elsewhere), and all too often the lawyers on one side end up more or less managing the whole process. As barristers must recall with a sinking heart, they are expected to assist an opposing litigant-in-person in court (not of course in making their case, but in the conduct of it in court).

But in these days of shrinking availability of legal aid for many matters, and of extremely limited financial eligibility for it, the lawyer’s traditional attitude to litigants-in-person perhaps smacks too much of special pleading.

We tend to assume that access to justice means first of all access to lawyers. For many, many people, those not abjectly poor enough to get legal aid, not rich enough to afford a solicitor let alone a barrister, this will only raise a bitter laugh. If it isn’t suitable  for a CFA, then the only option is DIY. Access to justice firstly and properly means the opportunity to take one’s case to a court and I suspect we will see a lot more litigants-in-person, beyond their current  stamping grounds of the small claims courts, LVT and assorted tribunals.

[Edit 5/02/08. And now the sine qua non of the litigant-in-person, Heather Mills prepares for a five day High Court hearing in her divorce.]