Ten Legal Facts to Win an Argument With

46. Hammurabi was a latecomer. The world’s oldest known written law code is the Code of Ur-Nammu of Sumer, predating Hammurabi’s famous stele by roughly three centuries — and it already preferred fines to mutilation.

47. The British monarch travels without a passport. Passports are issued in the monarch’s own name, so the monarch needs none — though every other member of the royal family does.

48. Bangladesh’s Constitution was born twice. Adopted on 4 November 1972, it came into force on 16 December 1972 — the first anniversary of Victory Day — a piece of constitutional symbolism written into the calendar itself.

49. The most famous snail in legal history is unproven. In Donoghue v Stevenson, the case settled after the House of Lords decided the point of law — so no court ever found as a fact that there was a snail in the bottle.

50. Two Divisions, one Court. Under Article 94 of the Constitution, the Appellate Division and the High Court Division are not two courts but two Divisions of a single Supreme Court of Bangladesh — a structure the Eighth Amendment case treated as constitutionally untouchable.

legal-writing facts

51. The reasonable man rides a bus. English law’s standard of reasonableness was famously personified as “the man on the Clapham omnibus” — an ordinary commuter elevated into a permanent legal institution.

52. OSCOLA is a place, not a person. The citation system used by most UK law schools stands for the Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities.

53. Outer space is regulated. The Outer Space Treaty 1967 declares that no State may claim sovereignty over the Moon or other celestial bodies — making it one of the few areas of law with no landlords at all.

54. The barrister’s wig began as fashion. Wigs entered the courtroom in the seventeenth century because gentlemen everywhere wore them; society moved on, and the law simply never stopped dressing.

55. Juries can be quick. The shortest recorded jury deliberations have taken less than a minute — proof that occasionally, at least, the facts really do speak for themselves.