Since my last post regarding the proposed cuts in family legal aid and the press coverage of it, it appears that matters have moved on. The CEO of the LSC has acknowledged that the figure of £140,000 quoted in the press (and arising from LSC private press briefings) as representing average earnings of family legal aid barristers is inaccurate (no surprise there then). As a reminder the original article quoted Crispin Passmore, Director of the Community Legal Service, as saying, “The average annual earnings from family legal aid work is £140,000 – and that doesn’t include any privately paid work they might do. So we are not talking about the minimum wage”. The LSC assert that there has been ‘some misunderstanding in the interpretation of figures’ – what is notably NOT suggested is that the Times have attributed statements to Mr Passmore that he did not make. Assuming therefore that Mr Passmore did make the remarks, the twin questions arise – how and more importantly WHY were they made?
Tag Archives: news
Mills McCartney Award Announced – and Judgment published in full
Well, we all knew there would be some kind of appeal – and apparently it is by way of Heather Mills McCartney appealing the decision to make the full judgment public, due to be heard tomorrow. In the meantime here is a link to the summary of the judgment published today.
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In short, Heather Mills McCartney was awarded £24.3m inclusive – far far less than asked for and quite substantially less than some pundits had suggested. Paul apparently has an asset base of £400m. The award was based primarily upon need. This may have been a case involving extraordinary wealth, and for most of us £24m is in itself an extraordinary amount of money, but this was never going to be a case where anything like an equal sharing of assets was imposed, not least because the majority of the wealth in question was presumably treated as non-matrimonial.
Flying Carpets and Turkish Delight
I am flabbergasted at this story.
In summary a well respected High Court Judge in the Family Division has been roundly condemned by the Court of Appeal for making a string of remarks which were pointedly referring to the ethnic origin of one of the parties, namely a wealthy Sheikh. Mr Justice Singer has publicly apologised, saying he did not intend his remarks to be racist, but I find it difficult to comprehend how making remarks about flying carpets, sand, turkish delight and fasting – to describe the Sheikh’s evidence and in the course of expounding views about the case evidently not favourable to him – can be anything but discriminatory language. The Sheikh, having been told the submissions made on his behalf had been rejected by the Judge in this extraordinary way was surely bound to take matters the wrong way. It doesn’t take a brilliant legal mind to work that out.
On Planet Judge it may be considered clever and witty (perhaps it took the edge of the dryness of the figures), but unsurprisingly Sheikh Khalid Ben Abdfullah Rashid al-Fawaz had a sense of humour failure and went to the Court of Appeal. Rather than tell him to stick his appeal in his shisha and smoke it the Court of Appeal agreed that this was a ‘singularly unsatisfactory, unfortunate and embarrassing matter’, as indeed it was.
The legal world is not as advanced as some of us like to think it is.
Postscript. Geeklawyer and I are coming at this from ever so slightly different angles. Maybe I take life too seriously…
Postpostscript. (I should really read my feeds BEFORE posting). Also Family Lore has already posted on this – in more neutral terms than either myself or geeklawyer. Probably sensible.