Field Trips

This post is from two weeks ago, but I broke my usual rule and posted out of order because I was so excited about my birthday, then I got sick, then I had to write a paper.

Last Friday we had field trips to CEDR and the LCIA, which are the Center for Effective Dispute Resolution and the London Court of International Arbitration. I probably would have found these more interesting, except that it was a Friday, the room was hot, and I took a class in Comparative Alternative Dispute Resolution last summer in Oxford. So the talks should have been fascinating, but Professor Chow kept making comments like, "maybe you'd better explain what arbitration is" and I just wanted to scream, I already know that! I did learn two funny things, and they both have to do with Italy. First, during the talk on arbitration, the presenter was discussing the payment of arbitrators.  "It's a tricky issue," he said, "because you don't pay your judges ... unless you're litigating in Italy" WOW! I guess Italy's judicial system has a really bad reputation in the EU. Then, later in the talk, he explained to us a legal stalling device known as the Italian torpedo. You're representing a London corporation that's about to get sued by a foreign corporation, and you know you're going to loose. You want to stall, for whatever reason, so before the other corporation gets a chance to bring suit, you file a suit against them in the Italian courts. They won't be able to sue you until your case is disposed of in the Italian courts, and the Italian courts take forever, so you've just torpedoed their litigation against you! It's mind-boggling, really, that anything gets done in the EU!

Then, on Monday, we visited the Magistrate's Court and the Crown Court in Oxford. This was much more interesting than Friday's field trip, because we got to see actual cases. I feel bad for the poor defendants who had to be sentenced in front of an audience. The Magistrate's Court deals with the less serious issues, which mostly correspond to misdemeanors in the US. The Magistrate's Court is unable to give a sentence longer than 6 months, though it is allowed to give two consecutive 6 month sentences if there are two counts of crime. For sentences longer than this, the case must either be tried or sent for sentencing to the Crown Court. We saw a handful of cases, mostly "drink-driving" with one woman on a shoplifting charge thrown in. All of our cases were non-custody cases, as the police van from the jail was running late, and so we did not have a chance to see the first appearance of anyone who spent the night or the weekend in jail.

In the Crown Court we saw the first day of proceedings for a sexual assault case. It took the court a while to impanel a jury, and they were pretty annoyed about it. The entire first hour was people running around asking other courts if we could have the leftover jury members once they were done impaneling their juries. Then, when they did get enough people for a jury, both sides objected to having a police officer on the jury. I didn't understand why, as I could definitely understand if one side thought a police officer would be prejudiced for the other side, but why both sides of a case would object to a police officer is beyond me. We got to see the jury sworn in, with two separate oaths for the religious and non-religious. The religious ones had to swear with their hands on a bible and swear before almighty God, but the non-religious jurors swore something like honestly, truly, really.

Once they impaneled, the last hour was spent watching videotaped witness testimony. It should have been interesting, but the testimony was of a minor being interviewed about her experience. The person conducting the interview was so inept that the interview was incredibly boring. It was like he was trying to avoid leading questions, but was really trying to ask leading questions and so he'd ask the same question ten times in different ways. It really makes you wonder about the effectiveness of juries when trials are so boring. How can the jurors be expected to pay attention to everything?

Anyway, I just wanted to write about our field trips so that everyone knows I actually do legal things here. It's not just four months of front-row seats and weekend trips to Paris. I actually do homework, listen to boring lectures, and watch court cases. I even wrote a thirty page paper last week. It nearly killed me, but I did it.

And now it's spring break!