5 outcome might be); but, if hundreds of popular narratives, from jokes through films to three-volume  novels,  can  be  taken  as  a  guide  to  popular  opinion,  they  find  legal proceedings  incomprehensibly  slow,  over-concerned  with  due  process,  ignorant  of Occam’s  razor  –  that  is,  never  cutting  to  the  chase  –  and  always  in  danger  of collapsing  into  a  self-serving  desire  to  elaborate  irrelevancies  and  maximise  fees rather than keep the focus on the ultimate goal. The futility and self-perpetuating nature of some litigation was viciously satirised by Charles Dickens in Bleak House.  In referring to a case in the Chancery Division of the Courts in London called Jarndyce v Jarndyce (fictional, but possibly not too far from at least one notorious case of the time concerning trusts and estates)⁴, Dickens wrote:⁵ “Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on.  This scarecrow of a suit has, in  course  of  time,  become  so  complicated  that  no  man  alive knows what it means.  The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises.  Innumerable children have been born into the cause;   innumerable   young   people   have   married   into   it; innumerable old people have died out of it.  Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce  without  knowing  how  or  why;  whole  families  have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit.  The little plaintiff or defendant   who   was   promised   a   new   rocking-horse   when Jarndyce   and   Jarndyce   should   be   settled   has   grown   up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.    Fair  wards  of  court  have  faded  into  mothers  and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone  out;  the  legion  of  bills  in  the  suit  have  been  transformed into  mere  bills  of  mortality;  there  are  not  three  Jarndyces  left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and  Jarndyce  still  drags  its  dreary  length  before  the  court, perennially hopeless. Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke.” All institutions that seek to involve members of the public in issues of law and justice must face the public’s scepticism and distrust, not of the law itself, but of the kinds of obfuscating processes which authors from Dickens through Kafka to our own times                                                 4   The fictional case is reputed to be loosely based on Re Jennens, Willis v Earl of Howe (1880) 50 LJ Ch 4: see Hurst, G. (1949) Lincoln’s Inn Essays, Constable & Co Ltd at p 116-118. 5   At p20.