This week’s Substack essay is on George Blake – and how the English court system and the government struggled to come up with a legal basis for depriving him of monies from his memoirs – and how the solution finally adopted then caused its own legal problems for the law of contract.
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Blake was rightly sentenced to 42 years’ imprisonment in 1961, and he was perhaps lucky not to be executed, and the only real fault with his sentence is that the prison authorities allowed his easy escape in 1966. Blake ended up in Russia, lauded first by the Soviet government and then by Putin. He died in 2020.
Given this background, it is not hard to sympathise with those who wanted somehow to deny him the proceeds of a 1989 book deal for his memoirs.
The general sense from reading about what then happened is that both the government (under Conservative and then Labour ministers) and the judges thought something should be done to prevent Blake getting the monies from the publisher of his memoirs.
The problem was that there was little-to-nothing that could be done on the basis of the then existing law. And so the government and the courts sought to improvise (or ‘develop the law’ to use the polite legal fiction) a legal basis for denying him the publisher’s payments, with the House of Lords in 2000 coming up with something that had eluded the High Court and the Court of Appeal.
But the way the House of Lords ensured something was done to deal with Blake’s case meant, in turn, that an element of uncertainty was introduced into English contract law which, again in turn, lasted until the Supreme Court effectively limited the case of Blake to its own exceptional facts in 2018.
Blake is perhaps a good example of how hard cases make bad law – or at least uncertain law.
My Substack post tells the story of this fascinating hard case.
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Last week’s essay was on the lore of Lady Justice, and you can read it here.
The week before it was on the case of Jane Wenham and the last of the English witch trials.
Other essays include (in chronological order of the subject):
Dr Bonham’s case (1610) – and the question of whether parliament is really sovereign
Taff Vale (1901) – perhaps the most important case in trade union history
Wednesbury (1948) – the origin of the modern principle of legal unreasonableness
Malone (1979) – perhaps the most significant constitutional case of the last 50 years
These essays are on topics to do with legal history and legal lore – and they are in addition to my topical law and policy commentary here every weekday.
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