There is a famous aphorism that hard cases make bad law. Hard cases are said to include those in which there is special hardship or public controversy. Hard cases, in the words of the American jurist and judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, create ‘hydraulic pressures’, distorting the judgments of the justices. The judges’ oath, to be impartial and to take only the law, the facts and the evidence in the case into account, must be upheld even under the pressure of public sentiment or the judge’s own sympathy.
On the other hand, hard cases are the stock in trade of journalists and dramatists. Geoffrey Crowther, a long-serving editor of The Economist, is said to have advised young journalists to ‘simplify, then exaggerate’. There’s no point in writing if no one much reads what you have written. Dramatists and actors try to engage our feelings by a kind of emotional resonance which may come from an
