Monday night’s costu-romp The Scandalous Lady W – starring Natalie Dormer – concentrated on a 1782 court case of the “criminal conversation” (ie, a cuckolded man seeks compensation from his wife’s lover). It featured, as many dramatised English court scenes do, a judge yelling “silence” and bashing his gavel like Keith Moon at the Cow Palace.
Yet, as the judiciary’s own website states: “Although they’re often seen in cartoons and TV programmes and mentioned in almost everything else involving judges, the one place you won’t see a gavel is an English or Welsh courtroom – they are not used there and have never been used in the criminal courts.”
Legal writer Marcel Berlins moaned about their ubiquity in a 2009 Guardian piece about Garrow’s Law that inspired the creation of the Inappropriate Gavels blog and Twitter page – which chronicles their misuse on TV, in newspapers and elsewhere. Even solicitors’ adverts sport them. Not to mention books by judges and legal textbooks. It seems, ahem, that even the most respectable publications are not immune.
As inappropriate a gavel as you'll ever see, on tonight's "The Scandalous Lady W" pic.twitter.com/8vuYLjupXl
— Inappropriate Gavels (@igavels) August 17, 2015
So why are gavels everywhere? Is it because our legal system is so mysterious that most people in the UK never really see justice taking place, so don’t know any better? Or do directors just like to have someone banging and shouting for dramatic effect?
