Winter Solstice, 2022
Today is traditionally the “shortest day” of the year.
Though, of course, one cannot say anything as bold as that on the internet without somebody somewhere taking it upon themselves to type out a reply saying you are wrong: “actually, a day is still 24 hours long, technically” or “actually, a day is not scientifically 24 hours long exactly, technically” or “actually, not in the southern hemisphere”.
But this is the season of goodwill, even to reply guys, so this is a short post on the passage of legal time.
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Law has – or has had – its own rhythm of time.
In England, time ran from 1189 AD.
Before then, it was actually time immemorial, technically.
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Until 1963, Acts of Parliament were not formally referred to by the year in which they received royal assent, but by the session of parliament under the relevant monarch:
As you can see above, the very Act which made the change to modern dating was known as “CHAPTER 34 10 and 11 Eliz 2” notwithstanding the short title provided for in section 2.
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Case reports of a certain age also do not refer to the year of the case but to the volume number of the edition of the law reports, such as this famous case from the ninth volume of the exchequer reports at page 341:
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In the courts themselves, the “terms” were more important than any other time period, which Dickens captures well in the first sentences of Bleak House, before riffing on how long the case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce has taken:
“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. […]
“Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. […]
“The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.”
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Outside of court, the commercial world was more far dominated by quarter days than calendar months.
(And, of course, until 1752 the start of the calendar year was reckoned as on the quarter day of 25th March rather than anything more rational.)
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So a step into legal history is akin to stepping into a TARDIS or Marvel’s Time Variance Authority or an airport departure lounge – that is say, it like stepping into a world where the passage of time runs differently, if it can be said to run at all.
The notion that the English legal system corresponded with the year of lay people is a fairly recent notion.
And so reply guys correcting lawyers on dates will always run the risk of a rejoinder or surrejoinder of “well, actually…”.
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Have a happy Solstice, and thank you all for following this blog.
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At the risk of becoming a reply guy, a fascinating and slightly mind bending fact of astronomy is that the earth wobbling on its axis leads to days changing in length by about half an hour during a year.
Well, actually, at risk of getting too “technical”, it is not so much any wobbling, as a combination of (i) the Earth’s orbit being elliptical rather than circular – so our planet moves slightly faster around its orbit when we are closer to the Sun, reaching perihelion in January, and slightly slower when it is further away, reaching aphelion in July (yes, the Earth is slightly closer to the Sun in the northern winter, but it is the shorter day length that makes the difference) – and (ii) the obliquity of the ecliptic – the Earth’s rotational axis being at an angle to its orbital plane, which shifts around the position of local noon. The combination gives the so-called “equation of time”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time
Another amusing astronomical fact is that the the Winter Solstice this year incontrovertibly happened today, 21 December – the moment when the Earth’s north pole was tipped furthest away from the Sun, and usually when days in the northern hemisphere are shortest – but the solstice will slip into 22 December next year. And the earliest sunset (about 3:50pm in London) was about a week ago so sunsets are already getting later, but sunrises are also still getting later, and we have another week or so to go before the latest sunrise (about 8:06am in London). Today marks the point when sunsets are getting later faster than sunrises are getting later, so the daytime start getting longer again.
On the start of a new year, it is to some extent arbitrary. I can see a rationale for starting with the winter solstice, or Christmas, or the equinox, or another important date. Why copy the Romans and count from 1 January, so “December” becomes the twelfth month and not the tenth? Why not a day in the Spring, when life springs anew?
Merry Christmas to one and all. Let us hope for better times in 2023.
Lovely. And an expansion on ‘time immemorial’ and the legal remit of memory as witness testimony:
‘Up to the reign of Edward I (1272-1307), memory could legally be sworn to for events in the previous hundred years; anything further back was considered to be beyond the remit of the courts. A witness proved precedent by taking an oath that he remembered that such-and-such had been done by so-and-so’s father, who had told him in turn that he remembered his own father doing it. In 1275, and again in 1293, statutes reinforced this hundred-year rule by laying down that the coronation of Richard I (3 September 1193) was the ‘legal limit of memory’. But as written documents began to replace memory and its associated sworn testimony, that date of 1193 was never superseded. Now the law expected to rely on artificial memory – that is, paperwork – not the testimony of men who recalled what their fathers and grandfathers had told them. This new reliance on documentation was becoming more common in every level of society: by 1300, even English ‘serfs or villeins’ were presenting documents to the courts to prove their cases.’
A delightful essay. It reminds me of the occasion when the clock in one of the larger courts at the Victoria Law Courts in Birmingham (probably Court 5 or Court 6) started to run backwards. As it was directly in my line of sight from where I sat on the bench, I was probably the only person in court (apart from my clerk and the usher) to be aware of this chronological malfunction.
Merry Christmas to you & family David
rgds John
‘The longest night and I plan to make the most of it’ announced my husband in his wedding reception speech to hoots of laughter and embarrassed titters depending on age.
Happy Christmas days DAG.
A safe haven in a strange world.
Being more charitable, “reply guys” are more likely to be science types than humanities students. They can get a little antsy at the abuse of standardised measurements.
Well, actually … this all goes to show just how arcane the law and the legal “profession” is … and just how desperately it needs disruption and modernization.
Thank you for the many hours you have spent enlightening us this year DAG.
I wish you a happy Christmas and a fruitful New Year.
Look forward to reading your blog next year.
Very enjoyable post, thank you. Happy Christmas and New Year (whenever they may be technically) to you and fellow readers!
> As you can see above…
Well, better to see the Act as printed by the Queen’s Printer, headed “10 & 11 Eliz. 2 … Ch. 34” https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1962/34/pdfs/ukpga_19620034_en.pdf rather than your screenshot of the National Archives’ ersatz recreation as “1962 CHAPTER 34 10 and 11 Eliz 2”.
From which we can also see that the statutory short title is “the Acts of Parliament Numbering and Citation Act, 1962” – a comma somehow lost in the online conversion.
Beware hearsay evidence! And a happy new year.
Well actually, many of us in the accountancy profession continue to be ruled by Lady Day.
With the compts of the season and begging to remain, fir, yr humble fervant,
Wm Rofs efq
Maeshowe is a Neolithic chambered cairn and passage grave situated on Orkney, built circa 2,800 BCE. The entrance corridor is so placed that it lets the direct light of the setting sun into the chamber for a few days on each side of the winter solstice, illuminating the entrance to the back cell. But when I was there one summer we were told that as Earth has moved “over time” the light now misses its original target.
The corridor also contains arguably the first graffiti, in Viking!
Well, actually; as a matter of fact and as experience has shown, I think that as opined by Douglas Adams: “… time is an illusion, lunch time doubly so.
Can legal time be correctly considered a ‘triple-whammy’, particularly when considered in relation to CPR 44.3(2)?