Legal eagle Tushar Mehta recounts instances of the famous British humour as seen in law courts

Few professions attract as much ready-made suspicion as the law. Praise, when it comes, is measured; mockery, on the other hand, is abundant. Lawyers are variously described as dull, devious, greedy – or some artful combination of all three.

Edmund Burke famously observed: “Law sharpens a man’s mind by narrowing it.”

King Louis XII of France was even less charitable: Lawyers use the law as a shoemaker uses leather; rubbing it, pressing it and stretching it with their teeth, all to the end of making it fit for their purposes.

Even more damning is the statement of Professor Thomas Reed Powel, who defined the ‘legal mind’ as: If you can think about something that is related to something else without thinking about the thing to which it is related, then you have a legal mind.

An old comedy play also describes a lawyer as “an odd sort of fruit – first rotten, then green, and then ripe.”

These barbs, though not entirely undeserved, don’t paint a wholly accurate picture. The law has always housed not only logic but wit; and often the two travel together. Even in the most solemn courtroom, flashes of humour have punctured pomposity, deflated vanity, and occasionally restored proportion. This chapter is concerned...

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