Judge dismantles costs argument with eloquence and humour

Judge dismantles costs argument with eloquence and humour

A judge dismantled a legal argument about costs in a deportation case with remarkable eloquence and humour in a recently-published ruling.

Mr Justice Richard Humphreys was asked to rule on costs in a case which was struck out with consent after the Minister for Justice withdrew the deportation order off the back of a European court ruling in the applicant’s favour.

Noel J. Travers SC, appearing for the Minister for Justice, submitted that the applicant should be awarded no more than three-quarters of the costs.

However, Mr Justice Humphreys appeared unsympathetic to the lawyer’s argument, noting that the respondent “threw in the towel at the last minute”.

In one paragraph of his judgment, he wrote: “It is a tribute to Mr Travers’ intimidatingly immense learning and scholarship that each iteration of his argument seemed to the frail judicial mind to produce new preambular subtleties and qualifications, so that the path of reasoning which one had with difficulty managed to glimpse on the horizon turned out to be a mirage, and a new vista opened up in a different direction; a direction which at the same time one somehow knew would prove to be an equally false trail.

“It was an argument of such fluidity that grasping the same formulation of it twice was as futile as trying to step for a second time into Heraclitus’ river. His lengthy and detailed submissions defy summarisation any more than it would be possible to adequately describe a command performance of kabuki theatre using mere words.”

The judge awarded the full costs of the proceedings to the applicant against the respondent, including reserved costs, the costs of proceedings before the CJEU, and the costs of the costs hearing itself.

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