A Lawyer Writes

A Lawyer Writes

Misleading cases

Computer says ‘divorced’ — but are they?

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Joshua Rozenberg
Dec 20, 2024
∙ Paid

A judgment delivered yesterday had a title that was surreal enough to have intrigued even the busiest of reporters:

The ruling would not have looked out of place in a collection — such as this one1 — of A P Herbert’s Misleading Cases:

Why had Shabana Mahmood taken 79 divorced couples to court? And why were none of them there? As Sir Alan Herbert CH (1890-1971) had himself foreseen, the computer was accused of getting it wrong:2

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