Captain Ranty's "Legal Fiction"

I have been reminded by the good Mr Wadsworth (here) of a recent posting on the site of the deliciously entertaining but occasionally deranged Captain Ranty (here). In the piece highlighted by Mr Wadsworth the Captain made a bizarre and patently absurd assertion, namely that a judge in a County Court had made a finding in law that there is a distinction between between someone calling himself Roger Hayes and living at a particular address, let's call it 34 Acacia Avenue, and Mr Roger Hayes who has been billed for Council Tax at 34 Acacia Avenue.

The case to which he refers involved a claim being made in the County Court and I infer the local council had issued a summons against "Mr Roger Hayes" and served it at 34 Acacia Avenue claiming whatever sum of Council Tax for 34 Acacia Avenue had not been paid. I also infer that the only adult human being who is both known as Roger Hayes and lives at 34 Acacia Avenue attended court. When there he claimed not to be Mr Roger Hayes and not to be liable to Council Tax for 34 Acacia Avenue because he was Roger Hayes, the human being, whereas Mr Roger Hayes is legal corporation but not comprised of flesh and bones. I don't propose to waste a good keyboard on explaining everything that is wrong with this manifestly ludicrous proposition, save to say it has no merit in law and is almost certainly unfounded in fact (for example, I'll bet you a pig to a pork scratching that the human being has acknowledged himself to be Mr Roger Hayes hundreds if not thousands of times and has benefited from doing so - in passing, I wonder whether he has a bank account and, if so, whether the bank records the account as being that of Roger Hayes or Mr Roger Hayes, if the latter poor Roger would be liable to repay every penny he has ever withdrawn). What I want to explain is what the judge's conduct of the hearing amounted to.

By way of background, I should point out that nothing Captain Ranty or (Mr) Roger Hayes are saying today is at all novel. Every year the courts hear these and similar arguments being put forward in a vain attempt to challenge either the right of the court to hear the case or the very concept of enforceable law. Friday afternoons are reserved for such people by the procedural judges (known as Masters) of the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court. The arguments range from demands that the judge provides evidence of his appointment followed by a refusal to accept that the judge is a judge unless he can do so, to assertions that certain Acts of Parliament have no effect because they contravene Magna Carta, to attempts to get one judge to re-hear a case that has already been heard by another judge, and all sorts of nonsense in between. Experience shows that the best thing to do is sit back, let the barmy argument be put and then get on with the case. Frequently this involves adjourning the matter to a later date on the ground that further evidence is required on one point or another or because the court has run out of time due to the spouting, at great length, of unmitigated tosh by the misguided litigant. In some instances these adjournments are made in the hope the nutter will give up, and sometimes they do.

The choice for the judge is to allow the rubbish to be spouted, or to try to prevent it being spouted. No third way exists. Trying to prevent carries risks because the litigants are often either unstable or obsessed or both. Neither County Courts nor the High Court are usually staffed by a six-foot bouncer with a stun gun, instead they have an usher who is more likely to be a lady in her late fifties called Enid with no weapon more effective than a clipboard and a ballpoint pen. No judge is going to put his or her staff at any physical risk if they can avoid it, so the path of least resistance is adopted. This involves trying to dismiss the point briefly in the hope the annoyance will accept the indication and go away, but if that fails it is safer to allow them a "day in court". That does not mean that any credence at all is given to the eccentric theories being expounded, far less does it amount to an acceptance of those theories or that the person arguing them has any legal right to appear in the case at all. It's all a matter of practicalities. Years ago judges tended to be somewhat brusquer on average than they are today, yet even the most robust would show their greatest politeness when faced with a litigant in person barking up the wrong end of a very sturdy tree.

Nothing in the case referred to by Captain Ranty hints for even a second that the judge accepted any part of the fanciful arguments being put in front of him. Rather, it is a classic case of a judge trying to get a nutter to go away and then sitting back resignedly and facing the unappealing fact that the nutter will persist and should be allowed to do so to prevent any unpleasantness and/or the wasting of even more time by another judge being faced with exactly the same scenario at a later date.