A Trout in the Milk

Many of them suggest that engagement with the law can be perilous. The Scythian prince Anarchasis, in the 6th century BC, thought that "Written laws are like spider's webs," as they catch the vulnerable but can be torn to shreds by the rich and powerful. "The devil," says a 16th-century proverb, "makes his Christmas pies of lawyers' tongues and clerks' fingers." In the 18th century, Edmund Burke remarked that "Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny." (His contemporary Edward Gibbon, on the other hand, pointed out that "Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind.") A number of comments, while still critical, are less awed: Shakespeare's Falstaff referred jeeringly to "the rusty curb of old father antic, the law," and it was the opinion of Dickens's Mr Bumble that, "The law is a ass –a idiot."

In the end, however, the rule of law may be the final recourse. The modern saying "Justice delayed is justice denied" looks back over the centuries to the promise of Magna Carta: "To no man will we sell, or deny, or delay, right or justice."

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