What case or cases which the Jarndyce vs Jarndyce trial in "Bleak House" based on?

Question

It's obviously going to be a long running case in Victorian times.

Answer 1

Bleak House may be the best of Dickens' novels, certainly it must be among the most widely read. I would chose Martin Chuzzelwit as a close contender, but its daunting size and the anti-American tone of one segment keep it from achieving the popularity of Bleak in the States.

In the 19th Cent. England had three courts, Common Please, King's Bench and Chancery. Chancery (where wills were probated) had become an arcane mess, governed by ancient and obsolete rules of procedure and senility on the bench. Cases brought there were often lost in interminable continuances occasioned by miss-filings, and whatever obstructionist tactics attorneys could contrive to prolong the need for their services. Mountains of paper, and years of deferred action often put cases quite beyond the understanding of anyone while legal fees consumed the substance of the estate.

I do believe that Dickens is thought to have had a case in mind which had become celebrated for having fallen victim to procedure in Chancery; If true, I cannot recall it.

But it should be recalled that Dickens, in his youth, served as a court reporter, and in the course of his work not only became intimately informed on the ways of the law in London, but created a form of short hand that served him well both as a ct. reporter and later in his practise of taking notes on all he observed of human life as made his way through it, for a time as reporter for a news paper.

Answer 2

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RE:
What case or cases which the Jarndyce vs Jarndyce trial in "Bleak House" based on?
It's obviously going to be a long running case in Victorian times.

Answer 3

Dickens had been a court reporter and so had a wealth of information to draw upon, but he is believed to have based Jandyce v. Jarndyce on two protracted law suits: Day v Croft, a suit begun in 1838 and still being heard in 1854; and Jennings v Jennings, begun in 1798 and finally settled in 1878, although, as Dickens says in his Preface, 'if I wanted [more]…I could rain them on these pages, to the shame of a parsimonious public').

However, I can well believe that Jarndyce v. Jarndyce has the distinction of having been cited more in court than any other fictional case.

Answer 4

The UN and International Court were right that the US had broken an international treaty = an international law. Texas was also right to execute the murderer-torturer-rapist. The Humberto Leal case was not a clear-cut black-and-white issue. The fundamental problem with the case lies within illegal immigration, and our ineffectual way of tracking illegal immigrants at the state and local level back in 1994. Humberto Leal was an illegal immigrant. When he was arrested, he lied about his citizenship and falsely claimed that he was a US citizen when he was in fact a Mexican, illegally in the US. At the time of his arrest, he lied because he did not want to be deported, and he likely thought he would not be convicted or sentenced to die. Back in 1994, local law-enforcement agencies did not have an effective system of determining an illegal alien's status in the US. Texas did not provide him with access to the Mexican consulate because he did not reveal that he was a Mexican. He was treated and trialed just like an US citizen, as he had claimed to be. However, when Leal was convicted and sentenced for death, his situation changed: then he would rather be deported than executed. Then he declared that he was in fact a Mexican, hoping to use his citizenship to undermine the outcome of the first trial. He attempted to use his illegal status (which he himself had hid) to get a new trial or even his sentence commuted. The problem is that the US Constitution that protects an individual from "Double Jeopardy", which means he could not be trialed the second time for the same crime. So, if Texas reviewed and somehow overturned his sentence, he could never be trialed again; he would effectively escape justice -- due to him lying about his illegal status and taking advantage of a loophole created by a conflict between international laws and US Constitution. The International Court was correct that the United States had broken an international law regarding access to consulate -- which, ironically, was created at the insistence of the United States. Texas was also correct in refusing to review or commute Leal's sentence because Leal could have effectively escape justice due to "Double Jeopardy". In essence, our illegal immigration problem had also created this catch-22 situation for us. Either way, we were screwed. The good news is that, now that we have improved our system of tracking and determining illegal immigrants, local agencies now have effective ways to check everyone's status, and illegals can no longer lie about their citizenship status. However, we still have about 50 Mexican illegals who were convicted back before the 2000s and are now on death row, and they all had lied about their citizenship and falsely claimed to be US citizens, and now they are complaining that they had never got to see the Mexican consulate before their trials.