Lord Dyson is reported as saying that, provided agreement between the parties is subject to court consent, he can see no objection to allowing some freedom to the parties to manage litigation (news, 23 April). This seems to be reinventing the wheel.

Is that not precisely the system we had under the pre-Woolf rules of the Supreme Court? Having said that, such reinvention is probably necessary to ease the running of the square-wheeled justice system of the Civil Procedure Rules, which does not trust the parties to agree very much at all as to how a case should be managed.

Dr Julian Critchlow, Tregaron, Ceredigion

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