Temperatures may rise as high as a terrifying 40 degrees in London next week. This could ultimately prove good news for the courts backlog. When we’ve all drowned or melted, humanity won’t need any courts. Crime will disappear!
While we await this utopian outcome, is it time to consider a sartorial revolution? The oppressive heat has led some lawyers to consider truly drastic measures. Jacob Gifford Head, of Thomas More Chambers, asked his Twitter followers if they would ‘join me in petitioning the Bar Council to permit white linen suits in court in the summer’. Given the council’s distinctly equivocal stance on the bar strikes, he may have more chance getting a glass of water (or perhaps not).
The learned Tom Wolfe made a very fair point that the traditional Russell Cord fabric used for barrister gowns is hardly ideal when the thermometer is north of 30 degrees – especially when HMCTS ‘does two temperatures: Arctic and tropical’.
He also received a couple of replies citing Gregory Peck’s iconic outfit as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird (pictured). Obiter wonders if the courtroom stylings of 1930s Alabama are entirely apt for England and Wales in 2022. Even if the heat and humidity are roughly the same.
Gifford Head’s plea prompted some playful pedantry from his fellow lawyers, with the ICLR’s Paul Magrath firmly stating that ‘anyone wearing a short-sleeved shirt, especially under a jacket, should get short shrift’.
There is, of course, a fairly obvious solution: no gowns, no wigs and no jackets. Judges can be trusted to use their common sense. Can’t they?
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