you MUST take the victim as you find them. Hayward was later charged with manslaughter.For those of you who are scratching their heads right now wondering WTF is going on, it’s because in English law we have this thing called the ‘thin skull rule’ ie. In the process, she collapsed and died from a heart condition. Not when you’ve got a judge that begins his judgment by saying: “In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone….” in front of a couple that literally came to court to protest this cricket pitch.R v Hayward 21 Cox 692Hayward got into a row with his wife, who later tried to run away. Not quite the level of politeness I’d expect from the court, frankly-speaking.Judicial impartiality? Yeah, no way. Cricket balls kept falling into their backyard and they got so annoyed they decided to go to court to stop the cricket team from playing and get compensation for years of emotional distress.This case was made famous because of Lord Denning’s overly melodramatic judgment, which, if you were to summarise it in two lines, went like this: “I love cricket, everybody loves cricket (without cricket our young boys will become social degenerates), so sod off you stupid twats.” He then spends some time stating that the cows that grazed there before the houses were built ‘did not mind the cricket’.Another highlight of the case was how all the judges proceeded to call Mrs Miller ‘neurotic’ and ‘unreasonable’. I love this question because every law student in a common law jurisdiction knows that the absurd cases are what really keep you alive.And thankfully, with centuries of case law and several macro-national as well as national sources of law to choose from, English law is particularly rife with these ludicrous cases.I’ll group up these interesting cases into several categories and leave out the Legalese where possible.LEVEL 1 (basic): CASES WITH ABSURD JUDGMENTSMiller v Jackson QB 966The Millers moved into a house next to a cricket pitch.
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