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
Lord Eldon
the most famous probably of the 19th century chancellors, might more fairly be called infamous.
And he had a nickname, Lord Endless, because not only was he a perfectionist who tried by dint of time spent on it to get every judgment right, he was plagued apparently with some form of doubt whereby he always encouraged appeals from them as well.
Equity, the system of remedies administered in the Chancery Courts, alas, did not favour finality the same way common law with its jury verdicts did.
And so the self-interest of officers who got no salaries, only the judges had salaries in the 19th century, these officers with their terrible conflict
of interest and duty, the delays in every case, and then also what I'll call the way in which, in particular, trusts required to be administered in a way which is now opposite from what we do.
In those days, you had to have everybody who was possibly interested in the subject matter of the trust, all of them had to be before the court.
And if it was discovered that somebody had died or more likely had been born, then the case virtually had to start again.
Certainly, there would be excursions, sometimes years long, just to deal with something that had nothing to do with the dispute at all.
We don't have those rules anymore.
We learned the very hard way at the expense of the kind of litigants these horrible fates are described without exaggeration.
Blake House.
Depends what you mean by exaggerating.
Were there cases available to provide quite literal parallels to the fictional case?
Absolutely.
Were they typical?
Well, that's probably unfair.
But if you read some of the statistics and descriptions of individual cases in the commissions that were held in England, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, into these scandals, they collect
and display for the appalled reader cases which don't convict Dickens of much in the way of rhetorical
overkill?
Showing 61–80 of 138 · page 4 of 7
← Previous
Next →