All's fair - if it lets you sue

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23 December

Continuing from Nothing's fair in love and court cases


My guess is that too many people are going to be interested in the court case (and there are so many ways nowadays for news of it to be disseminated) for it to disappear : I have already outlined the tactical reasons that might lead to the decision not being appealed, and, with short time-limits usual within which appeals have to be put in, it will not be long before we know what has happened.


On the face of it, a judge finding a causal link between whatever schizophrenia is and abuse earlier in life more probable than not (the standard of proof being the so-called balance of probabilities). For those who found R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson's Sanity, Madness and the Family : Families of Schizophrenics compelling teenage reading, this ruling has been a long time coming, of course.

However, even if it depends on its own facts, it now legally challenges the orthodoxy that this loose bundle of symptoms called schizophrenia (where A might never hear voices, but B does, even if, say, they share (what is supposed to be) delusional thinking, paranoia, and numbness of affect) is heavily genetic in origin - and, whatever happens to this case, there will still be those who argue that there is a genetic predisposition* to respond to abuse in the way that the judge has found.

In the law of England and Wales, it is established principle in the law of tort (or some say of torts (which are just civil wrongs, some of them the non-criminal counterparts of criminal offences)) that one takes one's victim as one finds him. For example, the person negligently injured who has an egg-shell skull, and for whom the blow on the head was far more serious - on account of the fact that the person from whose negligence the blow has been found to result** is liable, he or she is liable for the complications that resulted (say coma, life-support, paralysis).

Bringing a claim for compensation for 'injury' (in its widest sense) resulting from abuse typically hangs back for any criminal case arising from the same facts to be brought, for the simple reason that the standard of proof is beyond reasonable doubt, so, although there are differences in approach, terminology and procedure between the civil law and the criminal law, a conviction is almost always going to establish the basic requirements of being able to prove a civil case., because another court, with a more stringent test, has already looked at it.

Some abused, perhaps, by Catholic priests, who went on to develop schizophrenia in their mid-twenties and who have been compensated may have agreed to settle all claims in return for receiving payment. Others may not have yet brought or settled their claims (and so would not need to test with the form of agreement had bound them and precluded future cases) might still have smoked skunk, known, in the unlucky few, to correlate not with the chilled experience that they sought, but with frightening psychotic experiences that they may no longer be free from.

A case to cite this Australian judgement, then, would best be brought by someone who was abused, whose abuse has been established but not yet led to a settlement or award, and who has not used recreational drugs, so that the picture is clear and not muddied. What stands n the way are likely to be several-fold :

* Availability of funding (even with insurance, one has to satisfy the insurers and their brokers that the chances are 51% or more of winning)

* The associated willingness of the legal profession (the advice of a solicitor or a barrister's opinion will almost certainly guide that assessment of the chances of winning)

* The calibre of the solicitor and barrister who take it on


How many years will it take for all this to be satisfied, and for a case to proceed to trial without the claimant (through pressure exerted by the defendant and its insurers and brokers and / or, as a result of tactical games, the claimant's own insurers and brokers) being induced to settle or knocked out in procedural wranglings prior to trial ?

Not to seem pessimistic, but I wouldn't be surprised at 15 years. If I'm wrong, take a case - surprise me, and prove me wrong !


End-notes

* We all know, of course, that even the behaviour of non-biological systems, let alone human nature, is in the DNA (as the phrase, for the nonce, has it).

** Charmingly known as the tortfeasor. It could have been indirect, in a road traffic accident (or RTA) - whatever occurred, if insurance is involved, the length of the case may rival that of Dickens' fictional Chancery one of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Images arbitrarily made interesting

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 September

Many people will have chosen to see the film All Divided Selves (2011) because it concerns Ronnie Laing, not because the director, Luke Fowler, is a candidate for The Turner Prize.

They will not have been disappointed to see some footage from when Laing became famous, and maybe from before, and they will have kept with his voice when it was heard alongside seeing material interposed between it and visuals of him speaking: sometimes we cut away from him to that material, sometimes we only heard his voice (perhaps because the recording was just audio, perhaps not). The interest, though, was not in that material, and it could even have been the test-card for all that it mattered.

Laing we saw at many ages, and with varying style of dress, but we always knew that it was he, and, once we heard him speaking and saw his lips move, we knew when we had his words being spoken. As to anyone else in the film and who they were, nothing told us, and only original captions - apart from what seemed a new inter-title regarding Esterson - told us two or three times what community we were being shown, so we might have had Thomas Szasz on the screen and not have known it.

So, yes, we hear Laing talking and being interviewed, but what the film offered as a polemic, as Fowler called it, might have been better achieved by a reading of select passages from Laing's publications, or by reading Adrian Laing's biography of his father. Plus there's Mike Moran's one-man play about Ronnie...

More on this topic here and a review, from the Berlinale, in The Hollywood Reporter here


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