This is a very trivial one even by my own standards of nonsense, because the only case I’m interested in this week (RE B&H fact-finding) hasn’t come up as a judgment yet.
As ever, I ended my most recent court hearing drawing up a court order, and like a reverse iceberg, only about a tenth of the document was an order, and the rest was preamble.
And that let me to muse as to whether the word means exactly what it suggests, that this is what happens before the amble. And it sort of does – it literally means before the walk. From perambulation, meaning walking.
That ended up leading me to consideration of preambles generally, and that the most famous/notable one is the lead in to the American constitution. I was hoping that it would begin “We hold these truths to be self-evident” since that is a better title, but no, it goes like this:-
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
My preambles are, sadly, never as lofty as that; though it is something to aspire to.
Apparently, no American Court has ever used the preamble as the basis for any decision, which is a shame.
And in an oddly circuitous event, one of the only two Children Act cases on Lawtel that deal with ‘preambles’ is the President’s decision on prior authority and public funding that I’ve previously blogged about, and the other one is my own case involving maternity testing and drawing inferences * where a child did not wish to undertake one which is undergoing a fractious final hearing this very week.
In that case, the Court of Appeal were very unhappy about the preamble to the order leaving the matter (a) unresolved and (b) proceeding on a fallacious basis.
So, although nobody in America has ever managed to get a case decided as a result of the preamble to the US constitution, I’ve managed to win an appeal where the preamble played a major part in that decision.
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[I actually had completely forgotten that synchronicity and was merely putting together something short on the charming concept that all of that preliminary drafting is something we do before the amble.]
* There are now two cases involving children not wanting to undertake DNA tests, and both produce different answers based on the very different facts. Both are in the tags.
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