Day 307 - 27 Nov 96 - Page 47
1 I set out what I thought the principles of law were, in my
2 view, to be applied?
3
4 MS. STEEL: All the legal things have been -- well, same as
5 everything, actually, it is pretty chaotic. We have some
6 lawyers who have been trying to look up individual matters
7 of law, and some of them we have had bits and pieces back
8 from that we need to discuss with them for finalising, you
9 know, the document or whatever. Others we have not had
10 anything back from them and we have to do some chasing up,
11 and it is not particularly easy to chase people up when
12 they are out on other court cases.
13
14 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Leave it there. Our plan is that you are
15 going to be sitting down in the middle of tomorrow. You
16 obviously have to read what Mr. Rampton provides you and
17 you have to listen to what he says, but to some extent the
18 pressure is off you because you are not going to have to
19 stand up each morning and carry on with your own
20 arguments. But you really must use that time to get any
21 propositions of law which differ from those which
22 Mr. Rampton has put forward -- or go beyond those which are
23 put forward -- word-processed preferably, so that you can
24 put them before me expeditiously and I can take them away
25 with me.
26
27 MS. STEEL: That is what we were hoping to do, set them all out
28 in documents and maybe refer to each one for five minutes
29 at the most, or something like that. Obviously, if more
30 explanation was needed or you wanted to ask questions,
31 whatever, that might take longer, but the intention was not
32 to do them all verbally.
33
34 MR. JUSTICE BELL: No. Carry on now with -----
35
36 MR. MORRIS: Can I say one other thing? You did originally say
37 that you expected, because Mr. Rampton was not going to
38 take so long, that we would have something like three or so
39 days after he served the things to read.
40
41 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I don't know, I will just have to wait to
42 see.
43
44 MR. MORRIS: All I am saying is, we had kind of prepared to
45 meet up with each other at the beginning of next week,
46 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, if those dates were going to be
47 off court, to kind of review where we are and what we still
48 have to do, all that kind of stuff. I don't know if that
49 is still-----
50
51 MR. JUSTICE BELL: At least I am going to ask Mr. Rampton a
52 significant number of questions. I am expecting him to be
53 on his feet in court really all next week, and the question
54 mark is how much longer and after that is he going to be on
55 his feet?
56
57 MS. STEEL: I thought you said that when he handed in his
58 submissions you wanted a few days off to read it.
59
60 MR. JUSTICE BELL: The plan is, as I expressly said, was that
