Surveying the dismal content of Berezovsky v Abramovich, Obiter can’t help feeling a little nostalgic for great court cases of the past. Our favourite, of course, is the 1961 ‘Lady Chatterley trial’, R v Penguin Books Ltd.

What’s not to like about a trial where the prosecution asks the jury whether the material in question was something one would like one’s ‘wife’ or ‘servant’ to read? Add to that a courtroom that heard the words, ‘Call E Morgan Forster’, and we have a standard that modern cases struggle to meet.

Last week though, Obiter was gripped by a modern-day obscenity trial, R v Michael Peacock, which, did, shall we say, tick a lot of our boxes.

The jury, clearly in tune with the times, found for the defendant.

However, some courtroom exchanges (reported through the fair, accurate and contemporaneous courtroom tweets of Obiter friend @NichiHodgson) suggest that not all legal figures changed their style with the release of the Beatles’ first LP.

The prosecution, noting that the defendant did not know ‘what class of person’ he was selling DVDs to, contended that we ‘have to draw a line somewhere’. And when informed that one witness was an expert ‘bottom’, the recorder asked for a definition of ‘bottom’.

With EM Forster dead, the defence, not content with quoting Foucault, reached for a contemporary author to make its point, asking - ‘do people decide to fly on broomsticks after watching [Harry Potter]?’

But in these already worrying times for legal services, Obiter wonders if there was not an unintentional relevance for the Big Society in one line of prosecution thinking: ‘What people do for money they do less carefully than things they do for free.’

Ponder that. Obviously after you’ve checked what your partner and the au pair are downloading.