Bret Walker SC
speaker
138 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 9 Jun
Bret Walker SC’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He wasn't Robinson Crusoe in this regard, but he was, of course, the most eloquent of all.
You say a touch of corruption.
It was essentially corrupt.
The notion that the so-called masters...
The six masters with the joke was there's 60 clerks.
This was a web of sinecures at the top, offices where you didn't actually have to do the work, but you creamed the takings, where they were making their own massive margins by requirements which were inflicted upon litigants.
Now, the delay...
that was hand-in-hand with this was a crime scandal.
Dickens, as I say, was not the first.
The first 60 years of the 19th century saw very strenuous efforts, most of them incomplete and all of them at least partial failures, to do something about this.
And it really wasn't until the 1860s, the so-called Judicature Acts,
where England really, having isolated, having debated, having tried to reform in Parliament, these terrible abuses managed to get to a recognisable form of relatively efficient administration of equity cases, cases involving specific performance injunctions, and in particular, the administration and guarding of trusts.
And now, of course, those are the courts which pride themselves on rapid determination of cases.
The irony is throughout all of this, you know, hundreds of years, including when Dickens was talking about, the courts actually required litigants to act with alacrity.
If you wanted equitable relief, you couldn't wait till the last day of some common law limitation period.
You had to get there smartly.
Equity is marked by discretion in its remedies, whereas common law is marked by rules.
And discretion could be guarded by whether somebody has delayed in seeking the assistance of equity.
You look back on it and you think, how could those judges ever have written
such obviously sensible admonitions to getting on with litigation starting quickly and continuing when they themselves were responsible for the most shocking delays.
Showing 41–60 of 138 · page 3 of 7
← Previous
Next →