Contempt of Court? Well That Depends…

Contempt charges are almost always an exercise in judicial muscle. You are a gnat, a court will say, who has attacked the very foundations of the legal system that protects us all. And should you happen to be charged you’ll almost certainly be paraded, humiliated and spat out by judges claiming to act more in sorrow than anger. The problem is that some punished for contempt are lower-hanging fruit than others.

Legal precincts have always had their crews of cranks and angries, pushing traffic fines to extreme appeals, spending hours reading up obscure Privy Council judgments, busting to beat the system. Noble enough in the exercise of accessing a citizen’s right to seek justice, and courts indulge them to a point. But eventually the more bothered of them get charged with contempt for what are usually nothing more than cumulative  and forlorn outbursts against what they regard as The System.

A soon-to-retire judge recently described one such litigant as “a pain in the arse”. A…