Badness in courts, of courts and of law lecturers

A quick outline of a busy news day…

The Court of Appeal says that (some) provisions of the Legal Services Commission’s Unified Contract are unlawful, specifically the most sweeping of the unilateral amendment clauses. The judgment is pretty devastating, finding for the Law Society on all points of its appeal of the earlier Judicial Review finding and against the LSC on their appeal. As a sample:

The power to amend (in this contract) is better characterised as a power to rewrite the contract.

Permission for the LSC to appeal refused, costs against the LSC. The judgment is here [pdf] and the Law Society’s comment here. What this will mean in practice, we will have to see…

Leeds Magistrates Court is to be investigated for failure to execute bench warrants when Defendants turned up on other harges and other matters. BBC video here.

And then, managing to offend the laws of God, man and academia in one fell swoop, we have lay preacher, law lecturer and convicted fraudster Malcolm Edwards-Saye, the self-styled Lord Houghton. He was involved in a £51 million VAT carousel fraud and was also convicted of stealing £18,000 from PI claimants via Claims Direct. Worth noting that disclosure failures on the part of the Revenue and Customs Prosecution Office meant that another 8 defendants walked on the carousel fraud. Top work.