I confess that I had never heard of this person before, but John Mortimer appears to have been one of the more interesting and influential proponents of civil liberties in British history.
He was both a defense lawyer--later a judge--and a prolific writer. As a writer he chafed against Britain's strict censorship laws, while as a lawyer he was in a position to do something about it:
Not only did his writing capture the essential humanity of the legal system, Mortimer himself appeared in many key cases concerned with civil liberty and alleged obscenity, often encapsulating important points in a very direct and arresting way.
He was opposed to the incursions on freedom of expression that the state was apt to attempt in the 1960s and 1970s. “The attitude of censorship,” he wrote, ” depends on the assumption that there is a superior type of person qualified to tell the rest of us what it is good for us to read”.
He noted, in the context of obscenity trials, that it was oddly anomalous that while murder was illegal it wasn’t a crime to write about it, whereas sex was legal but to write about it could be a crime.
Various of his jewels of legal wisdom came from his father, Clifford, who was also a barrister. Speaking of cross-examination, for example, Mortimer notes a precept of his father’s that it can be done politely and without hostility “the art of cross-examination is not the art of examining crossly”.
One of his aphorisms should be a lesson for the modern world. Mortimer observed that in a multiculutural society with varied secular and religious beliefs, “tolerance demands that no one group may be allowed to impose its moral views, however strongly held, upon another”.
Mortimer’s sanguinity of spirit, wit and extraordinarily powerful and funny storytelling have helped shape modern social ideas about what is good and bad in the law.
