Now, let's take a breather. Statistics, data, percentages, have a way of inducing yawns and causing the eyes to glaze over. Stats can also be like a ventriloquist’s dummy or case law – you can get them to say anything you like, as long as they agree with you. However, you may care to skim over them again. One can reasonably be sceptical about one stat in isolation. When so
and a few more stats ... ... The Judiciary The ‘2014 UK Judicial Attitude Survey’ reported on findings covering salaried judges in England and Wales courts and UK tribunals [1]. The report reveals that the judiciary is experiencing an erosion of social respect and feel undervalued by government and media, and that the working conditions have deteriorated over the last five years with caseloads growing significantly in recent years. Almost
This post sets out some rather gloomy stats about where the legal profession in the UK, USA and Australia was at in around 2015. From more recent discussions with lawyers, it's clear things have become far more pressured since early 2020. LawCare's stats for 2020 make sombre reading. Maybe unsurprisingly, there was a sharp rise in the number of lawyers calling their helpline seeking help with anxiety. Some extracts from
In 1973 two professors at the University of California published a seminal paper and introduced the idea of ‘wicked problems’ into the vocabulary [1]. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber proposed that the search for a scientific basis for confronting problems of social policy was bound to fail because of the nature of the problems themselves. They termed these ‘wicked’ problems. Rittel’s field was the science of design and Webber’s, city
