Weird and Wonderful Cases Every Law Student Should PDF

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Weird and Wonderful Cases Every Law Student Should Know(COMPRESSED VERSION BY ME)

Proctor & Gamble v HM Revenue & Customs In the UK, VAT is a tax, currently set at 20%, charged on products that are considered luxuries – so there’s no VAT on apples, milk, or tea, but there is on ice cream, cake decorations, cereal bars, and – crucially – crisps. This was a problem for Proctor & Gamble, producers of Pringles, who would rather not have had to pay a tax bill of around £100m if Pringles were considered crisps.

Potato crisp or “savoury snack”? How could Pringles not be crisps? Well, they’re described on the packaging as a “savoury snack”, and in 2008 a judge ruled that since the type of Pringles in question were only 3% potato flour (and 39% vegetable oil) they couldn’t be said to be “made of potato flour”, and therefore, they weren’t crisps. What they were instead is debatable – but VAT-free, anyway. But in 2009, HMRC appealed and despite Proctor & Gamble’s strenuous arguments that there’s nothing crisp-like about a Pringle, HMRC won and the Pringle was ruled to be a crisp after all.

R v Dudley and Stephens

Necessity isn’t always an adequate defence against murder, and that was vividly shown in the case of R v Dudley and Stephens. In 1884, Tom Dudley, Edwin Stephens, Edmund Brooks and Richard Parker were shipwrecked and adrift in a lifeboat 700 miles from the nearest land with no freshwater and only two tins of turnips to eat. This was on the 5th July. By 17th July, they had eaten the turnips and the entirety of a turtle they had managed to catch, and by 24th July, Parker had slipped into a coma. When their supply of turnips ran out, the men turned to more desperate measures.

Realising there was no other way to survive, Dudley and Stephens killed Parker, and the three remaining men (including Brooks) resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. On the 29th of July, they were rescued. When the case was brought to trial, public opinion was highly sympathetic to Dudley and Stephens, to the extent that their defence was paid for by public opinion. At the same time, the judiciary wanted it established that necessity was not a defence for murder. The ultimate outcome of the case was something of a compromise: Dudley and Stephens were convicted of murder, but sentenced to just 6 months in prison.

In 1954, four men in a criminal gang decided to commit a murder and make it look like an accident. They brought their

victim to a hut, got him heavily drunk, and hit him around the head with the intent of killing him. Believing they had killed him (although they had only knocked him unconscious), they threw his body over a cliff. He survived that, too (!), but later died of exposure. The victim later died of exposure. To commit murder, you need to have a mens rea (guilty mind) and actus reus (guilty deed) at the same time – killing someone when you didn’t intend to isn’t murder, and thinking of killing someone but not doing it isn’t murder either. In court, the gang argued that they had intended to kill him in the hut, and actually killed him by leaving him exposed to the elements at the base of the cliff – but that mens rea and actus reus had not happened at the same time – in much the same way as if you thought of your friend “I wish he were dead!” and then accidentally dropped a piano on them two months later, the earlier thought wouldn’t make the accident count as murder. But if this seems absurd, be reassured – the ruling said that it was all part of the same act, and found them guilty of murder....