Sod's law

Make me disappear

Super injunctions. These shady sexlife subtractors are to Perry White what kryptonite is to his star reporter. Sure, if he wasn't in possession of the world's most impenetrable disguise (a trusty pair of Tinie Tempah specs), Superman himself may have been a fan of the anonymity order. But anyway. Super injunctions. Tawdry stuff. So what we have here is exciting. Our chief press card thief, the intrepid Paul Martinovic, has finally got his ink-strained mitts on a telephone call transcript revealing exactly how a superstar meejah lawyer goes about bagging a gagging order for his Well Known Sports Personality client.

NB Names have been changed to totally arbitrary pairs of letters, per court order.

CALL #1 '“ 28/02/11 '“ CALL BEGINS AT 02:37 AM

AJ: Yes, hello?

AC: Oh, thank god. Have you heard?

AJ: Ahah I wondered when you would call. Of course I heard. What were you doing with a spud gun on the training ground anyway? A most unpleasant business. If you'd have called me earlier then I could'¦

AC: No, no, not that. Man that was last week! Have you not heard? Basically, right'¦

(ed: at this point much muffled background noise on AC's end of the line causes intermittent interruption in dialogue)

...(COQUETTISH GIGGLE) two whole bags of Spanish onions (BRIEF SNATCH OF HEAVY METAL) some mild exorcism (LIGHT SCATTERED GUNFIRE) spicy Tabasco rubdown (WEIRD HUMMING) several branches of Boots were forced to permanently close (GURGLING SOUNDS) land invasion of Richmond (CAMEL SNEEZING) then had to pay off the entire Armenian rugby squad.

AJ: Good god, MNI. That's quite a night. De Sade himself would blush. You really have surpassed yourself.

AC: (pause) Yeah, but you know how it is

AJ: I'll phone my chum judge OY immediately and get an injunction. It's just a case of whether we can get him to make it a super injunction as well.

AC: '¦but I don't have super conjunctivitis.

AJ: Dammit AC! Don't you know this by now? I've arranged four for you this month alone. OK - we can get an order to stop the papers printing stories, seeing as there's little chance your exotic onion parties are in anyway in the public interest,

AC: Sounds good man. So my mum won't know what I've been up to?

AJ: Well, you'll be anonymous, so no. But they might still be able to splash on the fact there was an incident they couldn't report.

AC: No way, they'll know it was me. Have you seen that chat room?

AJ: Well, this is where the super injunction comes in. Hopefully the old boy will draw us one up to ban the editor from even reporting the fact that they can't report what you don't want them to report, you see?

AC: (long pause) Uhum.

AJ: It'll be in place before dawn, judge permitting.

AC: Sweet! I'm off to celebrate!

AJ: Well, indeed. Try to take it easy this time, though. I can't have you waking me with another thousand-pound legal request this late again tomorrow, please.

AC: Hey, what's money when I've got you on my side, AJ? You're the best there is! (click)

AJ: Dammit, somebody has to be.

---CALL ENDS---

A miscarriage of jokers

Unless you've been living under a rock without wi-fi access for the past few months, you'll be well aware of the recent furore over the Twitter joke trial. For all you rock-dwellers, here's the rub: frustrated accountant Paul Chambers jokily suggests he'll blow up Doncaster Airport after discovering it is closed for his upcoming flight.

A week later, he is arrested by anti-terror police, and found guilty of 'sending a public electronic message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character' and fined £1,000. Chambers has since lost his appeal against the fine, and as a result Twitter has gone into meltdown, with thousands of sympathetic tweeters re-tweeting the offending message with the hash tag #iamspartacus in a show of nerdy solidarity.

For those of you who enjoyed the controversy, here's three other legendary cases where other would-be jokers were put back in their boxes (for a little while at least) by Johnny Lawman.

Oz Magazine

Oz was part of a burgeoning underground press in England in the late 60s, featuring a mish-mash of dirty cartoons, poems and radical political journalism. Many of Oz's peers veered into poor taste with questionable material, but Oz's fatal mistake was to involve children in the legendary Kids issue, a group of secondary school children were invited to edit the magazine, resulting in uproar from authority figures across the country, and the lengthiest and most famous obscenity trial in British legal history.

The editors were indicted for 'conspiracy to corrupt morals', a charge they were eventually acquitted for, but not before they served prison time, where their heads were shaved and they were roughed up by guards.

Fun Young Lawyer fact: the defence lawyer for Oz was John Mortimer, author of Rumpole of the Bailey.

Maxwell and Private Eye

Robert Maxwell enjoyed a tumultuous relationship with Private Eye to say the least.

While rumours about the newspaper magnate's shady business dealings circulated around Fleet Street for many years, Maxwell's huge wealth, power and litigious nature scared off most of those in the press.

The satirical magazine wasn't fazed though and repeatedly labeled him as a crook within their pages.

As a result, they lost a number of high profile libel cases and were required to pay Maxwell thousands of pounds in damages.

After his death in 1991, it emerged that he was in fact the massive crook that Private Eye had argued he was all along, having embezzled £1bn from his own company's pension funds. This validation of course almost made up for the crippling financial burden Maxwell had placed on them over the years with his relentless litigation. Almost.

Larry Flynt vs Jerry Falwell

Sleazy American grot-mag Penthouse wouldn't immediately appear to be the likely venue for a vital moment in the history of free speech, but that's exactly what happened in 1988.

After publishing a spoof interview with fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell where he discusses in lurid detail an incestuous tryst with his mother, Falwell sued publisher Larry Flynt for defamation.

After initially being convicted by a jury, the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of Flynt after ascertaining that people of a reasonable mind would never have interpreted the article as being factual.

Since this historic judgment, the ruling has acted both as a shield for parodists, satirists and mischief-makers and as the scourge of the powerful and sensitive.

The greatest bad lawyers of all time

In popular culture, lawyers have generally got a terrible reputation '“ lying, cheating, amoral cads and bounders, the lot of 'em. For every Atticus Finch there's a hundred shady criminals looking for a quick buck.

We at Young Lawyer try to help you aspire. We want you to achieve the best things in life. We believe in you. We love you. (That's enough '“ Ed.) The last thing we want to see is you head off down the wrong side of the tracks. So with that in mind, here's a countdown of fictional lawyers we're imploring you not to imitate or replicate in your burgeoning legal career.

5. Lionel Hutz from The Simpsons

Ahh, Lionel Hutz. Has anyone done more to taint the good name of the legal profession than Springfield's premier ambulance-chaser? Utterly inept at every aspect of his job, Lionel has appeared in front of every judge in the county'“ often as a lawyer. When he's not disappearing in the middle of a trial to call his AA sponsor and folk-rock superstar David Crosby, he's bringing a false advertising suit against the makers of The Neverending Story, or indulging in a belt of scotch at nine in the morning. Hutz's misdemeanours also include turning up to a trial without any trousers, forgetting the words for 'mistrial', 'judge' and 'lawyer', and accidentally running over a judge's dog. Well, if you replace the word 'accidentally' with 'repeatedly', and the word 'dog' with 'son'.

4. Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad

One of the slimiest lawyers ever seen on screen. Saul Goodman is a silent partner in a methamphetamine racket worth millions of dollars '“ his partners, the hesitant and inexperienced chemistry teacher Walter White and low-level hood Jesse Pinkman, are enabled and empowered in the drug trade thanks to Saul's expertise in the legal dark arts, including money laundering, evidence withholding and even body disposal. Sleazy and easy-going, but very, very dangerous.

3. Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight

'You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.' So muses Harvey Dent in an early scene in The Dark Knight '“ this is a little storytelling trick known as 'foreshadowing'. Harvey begins the film as the pin-up poster boy for criminal lawyers everywhere, fearlessly taking on organised crime and even literally disarming a henchman in court who brings new meaning to the phrase 'hostile witness'. But after the Joker murders his girlfriend and leaves him horribly disfigured, he is driven insane and engages on a murderous campaign of revenge. Still, he isn't actually practising law at this point, so... that's good. Right?

2. Maurice Levy from The Wire

The premier legal consul for Baltimore's drug kingpins, Maurice Levy is possibly the most amoral, repulsive and reprehensible character in the whole of The Wire '“ a serious achievement in its own right. Levy represents the most dangerous drug lords in the city, making huge amounts of money in the process '“ the key Levy moment comes when he cross-examines shotgun-toting scarfaced outlaw Omar in the witness box, labeling him a 'parasite'¦.leeching off the lifeblood of the city'. He is more than a little stunned when Omar retorts: 'Just like you man'¦I've got the shotgun. You've got the briefcase. It's all in the game though, right?' When you're receiving a pithy lecture in moral relativism by a drug thief in court, you know you're an evil fictional lawyer.

1. John Milton AKA Satan from The Devil's Advocate

He's Satan, AKA Lucifer, AKA the Prince of Darkness, AKA the personification of all evil. So of course his day job is as a partner in a Manhattan law firm. Jeez, Hollywood '“ WE GET IT. You don't like lawyers.

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