Day 291 - 31 Oct 96 - Page 32
1 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I do not want you to do it now. I would
2 like you to do your best to do it tomorrow.
3
4 MR. RAMPTON: Can I say this; in preparing the ground for a
5 typically evasive answer from an advocate, it does depend
6 to a large extent on what your Lordship wishes me to deal
7 with. It is not done yet. Unless people want to have
8 bunches of notes, but I would not dream of giving the
9 Defendants what I have done at the moment anyway, unless
10 ordered to do so.
11
12 What I am hoping is that your Lordship will get, I am
13 afraid, what will be quite a long document, set out
14 actually, as it happens, in precisely the way that your
15 Lordship indicated it would be helpful, with the
16 references, for the most part, on the left-hand side of the
17 page and propositions set out in the main body of the
18 text.
19
20 What I would hope to be able to do, I hope it will be
21 possible to have the whole thing typed by 22 November, let
22 us say, is to give it to your Lordship, and then of course
23 to the Defendants, with maybe a weekend and a day to read
24 it, and then I would expect to find that your Lordship will
25 raise certain things with me.
26
27 There will be certain points on which I have already made a
28 note. I shall willy-nilly want to have a go, if I may put
29 it like that. There will not be, as it happens, a very
30 great deal by way of response to anything in the
31 Defendants' case, because, for large part, whether I am
32 right or wrong about it, for the large part we do not see
33 the case in the same way as the Defendants do.
34
35 At any rate, certainly rainforest is one and animals is
36 another, nutrition is probably going to be another, and so
37 on. We may be ----
38
39 MR. JUSTICE BELL: What I would like you to do, on the basis
40 that when you hand me whatever you have prepared, I take
41 something like a day, and perhaps a Saturday and Sunday to
42 read it through, then how long you expect to be on your
43 feet. I have got a growing idea of how long the things
44 I might want to ask you about, which I might say are really
45 in relation to matters of principle and what the meaning is
46 and what effect it would be if I thought this was proved
47 but that was not, and so on, matters of that kind, but I
48 will have some idea of how long that will take and I can
49 add it together and I can get a more reliable picture of
50 how long your presentation will take.
51
52 MR. RAMPTON: If your Lordship would give me -- I say this on
53 the basis of what is in writing now, there are certain
54 sections which are obviously going to be much longer than
55 others. Nutrition, for obvious reasons, is going to be a
56 long section.
57
58 If your Lordship was willing to give me the best part of 10
59 days, that is to say, two weeks of court, I do not know how
60 long your Lordship would want with me, as it were, as
