As if you are stuffed for an exam, i don’t think i’ve ever heard of you getting below a credit for a uni subject. Being so gone for a subject doesn’t mean you ain’t going to get a D.

Hey

Your lucky – a few more weeks to study…

Mine start tomorrow morning (yuck!)

Revise 2400 pages…I am trying to put this in terms I can understand…that means reading a couple Robert Jordan novels and an Orson Scott Card novel. And then revising the whole of them. Wow. Wowowowowow. Go Stu!

Unfortunately judges don’t tend to write as clearly as Jordan and Card… and the older judges seem to dislike fullstops and paragraphing, leading to paragraphs that run for up to a page long in an 8pt font size.

I remember being confronted with this sentence last session in a the headnote of Cooper v Stuart (a 1889 case): “The question in this appeal is whether an exception or reservation of such quantity of land not exceeding ten acres as might be required for public purposes contained in a grant by the Crown of lands in fee simple subject to a quit rent is void.”

I mean, that is just obscene. It took me like half an hour to decipher that single sentence. Thankfully, judgments have become more modernised lately (shorter paragraphs, subheadings, punctuation).

The reality is of course, no one actually revises those 2400 pages. They just nick notes off other people and revise those. Not that those notes are particularly brief either, but they are better than the alternative!

That’s still a lot.

the 1889 case: was that about eminent domain? It sounds an awful lot like it.

Almost – what Americans call “eminent domain” we call “resumption” (of land by the Crown). From memory, I think the Cooper case was something about the Crown giving a grant of land to someone, and the grant contained an exception which allowed the resumption of up to 10 acres of land to the Crown. The issue was whether the exception was void for repugnancy (something about the rule of perpetuity), and if it was void, the Crown couldn’t get the land… pretty drab case.