Supreme Court art: crash

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a...

A solicitor pulls something out of his pocket and a card bearing the three-in-one Mercedes Benz logo flutters to the carpet.

The imperative to drive overrides common sense. We're here because of a car crash.

I was once on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Old Bailey. Some people in the group with untroubled consciences sprang up into the dock and giggled. Not me. That space is not to be taken lightly. There but for the grace of God go I together with anyone else who drives what statute calls 'a mechanically propelled vehicle'.

I've had a bad morning. Shouting at my computer. Behaving badly. So I didn't deserve a treat but - WIGS!!

Most Supreme Court hearings are not robed but today counsel have a range of headgear from the neat, pearly and optimistic to the gnarled, grizzled and patinated.

R v Hughes is a dark tale. When an unlicensed, disqualified or uninsured person drives faultlessly, does he or she commit an offence under section 3ZB of the Road Traffic Act 1988 if the deceased caused the accident? Mr Dickinson took a bend on the wrong side of the road under the influence of heroin, methadone, benzodiazepine and other unprescribed additives, laced with lack of sleep. He died after his car was hit by Mr Hughes's van. Mr Hughes was uninsured and driving without a full licence.

Lawyers, not logicians or vengeful furies, are deciding the answer. During the arguments a hypothetical case keeps jumping off a motorway bridge in slow motion, his demise considered at various stages of his fall and impact.

Time passes swiftly. Lunch is an eventful New York deli-style beef pastrami and Monterey Jack cheese sandwich and a Kit-Kat. In the bright white cafe, three robed barristers settle like exotic birds around a solicitor in blue and pink checked socks. One of them has a eureka moment: 'The answer is this!'

The gown of the youngest member of the team brushes my arm as she goes past.

Talking of wigs, I once proposed to illustrate a law firm's history with this engraving [right] by Hogarth, which dates from around the time of the firm's foundation.

The senior partner was aghast: 'We mustn't offend the bench!'

That was in 1996.


Coda:
This morning, the cabby asks why I'm going to the Supreme Court.
'To draw it.'
'Ah, I had one of them in the back of the cab. She told me all about it. There are three of you, aren't there?'
'I'm not one of them,' I say. 'They do it properly. Julia, Priscilla, Elizabeth.'
Er, I do it my way.
'I'll remember their names,' he says.

More pictures if you scroll down, including a few attempts at Lord Kerr, but none of them keeps still.

Supreme Court art - pensions, black holes and Henry VIII

Above Henry VIII floats the head of a young red-headed woman. The king's image is carved into the oak of the public seating - a likeness copied from Holbein but slimmed down a bit.

The woman twists her long slender neck to look at me from time to time. She is alert. But none of us knows our own context.

Then I draw the umbrella in the foreground. Let other pens dwell on umbrella pension trusts. Nortel and Lehman are here in a jam-packed courtroom, peering down the pensions black hole with a torch.

So: when a Financial Support Direction or contribution notice under the Pensions Act 2004 is issued after a company goes bust, what is the obligation, if any, on the company and office-holders?

'...eroded away...' says someone in the courtroom, and I'm blasted back a few decades to a lecture about translations of the Bible in which an academic was slaughtering lumpen modern versions.  

' "Eroded away",' she said in disgust at the superfluous word.

Lunch is a tuna mayonnaise and sweetcorn sandwich and a Kit-Kat.

Back in court I chat to two women from the regulatory side. I explain that I am Typhoid Mary when it comes to pensions. Reader's Digest. Equitable Life.  'Ah,' says one, 'you're on our side then.'

In my next drawing I catch Nathaniel Hone's soulful portrait of Sir John Fielding, who dwelt in the black hole of blindness after an accident when he was 19. Brother of the more (or less) famous Henry (depending on your point of view), he became a magistrate and social reformer.

In the drawing of transparent layers (below), red represents the justices, yellow the court staff and a judicial assistant, pink the people in the legal teams' seats. Those in the public seats are outlined in black.















Oh, don't trust the umbrella. It falls over with an oracular crash. It lies pointing away from the black hole - one of the ventilation grids in the carpet. I've only once dropped charcoal in the Supreme Court: it vanished down a black hole. That taught me to be more careful.

More pictures if you scroll down.

Detail from Henry VIII drawing above



Sir John Fielding by Nathaniel Hone

Supreme Court art: shades of white

You can watch the court action on adjacent monitors
in the basement

Today's hearing is veiled in white. Vestergaard Frandsen A/S and 2 others v Bestnet Europe Limited and 5 others concerns insecticidal mosquito nets.

Have trade secrets been misused? Must someone with an obligation of confidence know that an act complained of breaches that obligation?



Counsel has two default positions

Fittingly we're in Court 2, the white-painted box, which brightens the eye and sharpens the mind.

The justices are needling counsel. Every argument is dutifully brought out for inspection in the sunlight which filters through off-white flower-embossed blinds.

Counsel moves around a lot but doesn't ward off the occasional painful bite from the cloud of justices:

'It doesn't really help with the point we're on at all.'
'As such, no, my lord.'
'As such.'

Then, after under two hours, proceedings are brought briskly to a close: the court decides not to hear the respondents.

I wander along to the basement café. Sun streams down from the roof-window several floors above and bounces off the shiny white tables.



Such brightness demands a melancholy thought: The White Duck, an eighteenth-century meditation on white on white painted by Jean-Baptiste Oudry. (Make that white on cream on gold on silver on grey on honey on brown, and a chorus of textures.)

Melancholy because this rhapsodic still life was stolen from us all in 1992, from Houghton Hall in Norfolk, taken out of its frame. Does it have a loving curator? Is it rolled up and cracked? Can it hear rats? Will it be recovered before its keepers forget where it is, or die?

Court 2 window blind. The direction of the
curves in the composition shows you
I am left-handed

There is no sitting this afternoon so I make my own entertainment.

In the basement gallery there are two white marble bears, the gift of the Chief Justice of Canada, set under a glass table-top. They are a source of atavistic confusion to the Supreme Court's own souvenir bear who peers in from above.

Then, in full sight of The Queen, he decides to cover everything with billows of white.

Supreme Court art: service and the eyes of a child

Today's case is about finding the right address. Talking of which, cabbies tend not to know where the Supreme Court is - the building was Middlesex Guildhall when most of them did the knowledge. This morning I'm offered the House of Lords.

Abela and others v Baadarani concerns the service of a claim form - but, to quote my favourite Rodgers and Hart song, Where or When?

There have been livelier sessions. Counsel are yomping through treacle. In the public seats, some people resort to furtive (forbidden) mobile phone action. To ward off a rumbling stomach, the man next to me eats an inch of cereal bar.

How long is too long? What is 'good' in the sense of 'in good time'?  There's never enough time in court to draw. I'm absorbed like a child. Sometimes I feel a bit swoony. I think I'm forgetting to breathe.

 

I'm playing with a new double-edged Kuretake pen, a point one end, a brush the other (all too easy to draw on your clothes with these twin-end jobs). Does time pass more quickly for me than for anyone else in court?

Lunch in the basement café is a prawn mayonnaise sandwich and, at 79p, the most expensive Wispa I've ever eaten.

The courtroom layout carves the personnel into four slices: public; legal teams; judges; court staff and judicial assistants. I try to represent the different strata in this picture (right) as transparencies or ectoplasm.

I think of  Barocci's The Last Supper (below; on loan to the National Gallery until 19 May) where the four strata are servants, disciples (outer layer), top tier at the table, angels.

Yesterday, Lord Justice Hughes and Lord Justice Toulson were sworn in. Their families watched the ceremony from the public seats. I watched on Sky. To end the formalities, Lord Neuberger said he hoped that the conduct of the new justices would be as exemplary as that of their grandchildren.

'The Last Supper' by Barocci

 

Towards the end of today's proceedings, a family comes in to watch. The little girl is a dead ringer for John Everett Millais's daughter Effie, his model for My First Sermon and My Second Sermon (both below).

Time is running out. I pass a note to her parents: may I draw her? I'm hoping for a second-sermon pose, but the eyes of a child point to a truth: it's never boring here if you know where to look.

More pictures if you scroll down.

Looking out of the window





 

Uses for the Financial Times, part 2

Protecting a mirrored occasional table from my drawing materials. More on the other side: http://boulevardisme.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/the-bracelet-to-julia-by-robert-herrick.html

Occupy: dreadgate

Tom (left) is refused permission to speak further

Inside the Royal Festival Hall the Philharmonia plays Charlie Chaplin's music to his 1936 film Modern Times, a satire on the Great Depression.

Outside the auditorium, Occupy is having a meeting. Activism and satire are an awkward mix. They create conflict in the soul of Johnny Teatent, aka Tom.

In the squat

From Tom's belt dangles a white man's dreadlock - the only one the man possessed. It is long, springy and shiny. It gives Tom a faint air of My Little Pony back to front. It is described as a scalp, a body part.

What follows is comic and tragic. The glaring need for professional intervention gets lost in a thicket of bureaucracy and self-congratulatory meeting-itis. The victim has asked me to cut what happened. (I suggest he goes to the police, but then I'm a taxpayer.)

Some people leave the meeting in a sweary flurry. Chaplin's sentimental music swells.

Next, the squat pub quiz.

The quiz is at Eileen House, Elephant and Castle, a brutal architectural disaster and subject of an eternal planning dispute. I am accused of seeking glamour in going to the squat. I wish.

'Is the asbestos on this floor?' says someone. Shrug. There is bright cheerless office lighting, a room full of bikes, grey everywhere, a couple of friendly dogs.

My friend Orlando goes to buy himself some tobacco. He comes back. He's left the tobacco in the shop. He goes back for it. Orlando and Tom are probably cool but I don't have a cool gauge. Tom has front teeth missing - knocked out by police, he claims.

Tom, Orlando and I are a team, the Radical Quiz Faction. The questions are monotonous.

'What does LASPO stand for?'
'Name two open-air squats in London.'





Supreme Court art - Bank Mellat and Richard III

In Bank Mellat v Her Majesty's Treasury there is an undertow of violence. The goodnight-all option.

I'm holding charcoal. That's one thing the planet wouldn't be short of after the bomb.

Observers in the public seats

Is Bank Mellat controlled by the Iranian state and funding nuclear arms proliferation? That's not the issue here, which is a procedural one: are directions made by the Treasury under Schedule 7 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 in breach of, inter alia, the rules of natural justice and/or article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and/or the procedural obligation in Article 1 Protocol 1 ECHR?

It's a rare day for forensic twitchers: nine judges are sitting, the maximum. Five is routine here.

Lady Hale is keeping counsel up to the mark. I find her interventions scarier than Lord Neuberger's regular 'Yup' (surtitle: 'We are with you, sir or madam, so please be so kind as to proceed at a brisk trot.')

Counsel: 'The judgment which I have struggled to explain...'
Lady Hale: 'Do you mean that ironically?'
Counsel changes gear politely.

'Why do you say it's only a small point? It was virtually the whole submission in the Belmarsh case.'
That is changed to a short point.

'In what sense is this legislation, i.e. lawmaking? Is it not more akin to a private Act of Parliament?...This is not an ordinary statutory instrument. I just toss that out.'

Lady Hale with judicial assistants behind her

'What would be the consequence of this being a hybrid instrument?'
Counsel will have a look at that overnight.

I have pen malfunction: I forgot to fill it. I've got a bottle of ink stuffed in a toilet roll - the ideal way to transport it - but I'd get thrown out if I went through all that palaver near the Supreme Court carpet.

'My lords and lady,' says counsel, 'can I bring in the question of anxious scrutiny?' Anxious scrutiny is what I'm all about here, I think.

The court has to deal with persistent bundle malfunction today. And what a bundle. 'Looking at page 6000...'



Students in the public seats

A judge mutters, 'We can tell what the photocopier thought of this judgment anyway.' I don't know if he means the machine or the person (the Victorians called a typist a 'typewriter').

An incongruous sound: a baby is crying offstage.

There is analysis of whether a party was, in legal terms, an unwitting or unwilling actor. I look idly around the court as I try to think of an example.

I see Richard III carved into the oak bench next to mine, his image copied from the version in the National Portrait Gallery. Was his involvement (if any) in the death of the princes in the tower witting or unwitting? We won't know unless rock-solid proof emerges. And are those car-park bones his beyond reasonable doubt? Leaving aside some national emotional need, would the skeleton stand up, so to speak, if subjected to the rigorous standards of this court?

I don't think so. Sorry.

In the basement café I buy a hefty illustrated paperback, The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom - History, Art, Architecture - a great bargain at £10. The double portrait of The Queen (below) is in the book.

 

 

Coda: this is a report of 20 March 2013. On 21 March the court sits in secret session for part of the time.