Codd's Last Case and other Misleading Cases

Everyone familiar with A.P. Herbert's Uncommon Law will welcome this new collection of misleading cases. Here is the redoubtable Haddock once again struggling in the toils of the law:-

• squabbling over a matter of precedence on the river when his boat capsizes a ladies' rowing eight ;
• making further attempts to hold the bank to the letter of their obligations,
• forcing honest juries to decide whether a patent food would have relieved the sinking feeling of a reasonably sinking man
• and tackling more topical anomalies in chapters such as 'Whose passport is yours?'

Other litigants, too, enter the field; what, for instance, is an heir to do when his crucial coming of age, and the equally crucial death of a relative, happen on opposite sides of the International Date line? In this volume the hard-pressed-we might even call him case-hardened-Justice Codd retires from the Bench ; but in his parting speech he is able to make up for much restraint in the past.

Here again we have Sir Alan's ingenuity extended to its utmost : his maniac realisa¬tion of the extreme possibilities of the law combined With a real knowledge of its diffi-culties and not unalterable inadequacies. Anomaly and injustice are exploded with wit and imagination ; and the trials of Haddock more often than not point to a simple enough solution of these most tortuous of legal problems.