Dissenting opinion

Press, 28 March 1981, Page 17

Dissenting opinion

I Wigs and Weepers. By George Joseph. * The Law Book Company Limited, 1980. 149 pp. $12.25. (Reviewed by A. K. Grant) This collection of legal anecdotes: quips and curiosities has a foreward from the presentGovernor-General, commending it not only to the general reader for interest, but to . lawyers and law students for instruction. When a book has issued forth under such august patronage, dare a mere reviewer hold, let alone voice a dissenting opinion? Well, justice, as the legal maxim has -it, must be done though the heavens fall, and I am bound to say that I do not find in the book the qualities which have manifested themselves to Sir David Beattie. * Some of Mr Josephs anecdotes are entertaining enough, but some have little or no point, and others are distinctly hard to swallow. There is also some rather ropey scholarship; a quotation from a speech by Angelo to Escalus in “Measure for Measure,”on the subject of juries, is said to come from “Macbeth.” You do not have to be Professors A. L. Rowse or G.

Wilson Knight to know that there is no character called Escalus in "Macbeth.” i The book is also marred by the sense of smug self-satisfaction, which so many lawyers exhibit, and which is one of the main reasons why lawyers are so : !• unpopular. Years ago, whenever a lawyer j was elevated to the Supreme Court Bench, the "New Zealand Law Journal” would print in full the tributes addressed to him on his swearing-in by the Attorney- ( General, the Law Society and so forth, i The amount of hyperbole in these 1 addresses was unbelievable; every incumbent was described to his face in terms which made him sound like a combination of Lord Denning, Wilson i Whineray and Sir Bernard Freyberg. Mr Joseph's description of his career in his “Author's Foreword’’ partakes of something of this quality: “I have opposed - many counsel whose names are now legendary — C. S. Thomas, Arthur Donnelly, A. W. Brown ..and so on, and so on. There is nothing wrong in reviewing your career with satisfaction provided you do it to yourself. But when you do it in public, self-deprecation and rigorous modesty are what win vou friends among your readers.