International Law

RIP Sir John Mortimer

Although Sir John Mortimer passed away a week ago, if you haven't read his obituary written by Geoffrey Robertson in  The Guardian, you really should.  It reminds us there was more to his extraordinary life than the creation of Rumpole of the Bailey:

But nothing in the training of the English bar and bench had equipped it for the underground press, and when, in 1971, a largely unreadable magazine called Oz published a cartoon strip featuring Rupert Bear with an erection, its editors were treated as if they had committed treason. QCs, their cab-rank principles forgotten, fled from the proffered defence brief.

A few days before the trial ? for conspiracy to corrupt public morals, an offence carrying a maximum of life imprisonment ? Richard Neville and I showed John the offending publication while he was lunching a young woman, also named Penelope. They giggled. We begged him to take the case. "Goody," was his response.

Thus began his second life, as defender of the apparently indefensible, as creator of Rumpole and much else besides, and, from 1972, following his divorce, as husband of Penelope Gollop, Penny the second, and father of Emily and Rosie. His first wife died in 1999. Two autobiographies, Clinging to the Wreckage (1982) and Murderers and Other Friends (1994) speak of a life anchored in family, yet lived in a daily dramatic jumble of court cases, plays and television series, sharply observing the vanities of the world through the blur of diminishing eyesight.

John retired from the bar in 1981. Rumpole was the barrister he wanted to be, but wasn't. He was too nervous ? petrified before a big case, and diffident about his own abilities. However, his final speeches, meticulously handwritten, were minor works of literature. Almost alone at the bar, he could laugh a case out of court (had he stayed, he would have made a fortune in libel defences). His forensic contribution to the Oz case was effectively to end censorship for the written word, first for literature, by arguing the appeal which freed Last Exit to Brooklyn (the 1964 novel by American author Hubert Selby Jr that was prosecuted under obscenity laws for its treatment of sex, drugs and violence), then by persuading the jury to reject the moral corruption charge, and going on to demolish, at the appeal, Judge Michael Argyle's directions on obscenity.

Of course pornography corrupted ? starting with the policemen charged with enforcing the laws against it, many of whom were later jailed for taking bribes. John put on his wig and took off his glasses, so he could not see some of the trash he was called upon to defend with a success that drew rage from Mary Whitehouse and an extravagant attack from the Times, which claimed that no jury was immune to his charm.

The Williams committee on obscenity, reporting in 1980, agreed with Kenneth Tynan in crediting John with achieving a de facto freedom for the written word by his victorious defence of Inside Linda Lovelace (1973), a shabby little book that would have gone unnoticed had the DPP's office not decided to dignify it with a prosecution, after which it sold a million copies.

Read the full obituary here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on January 22, 2009 (boomark / email).