Lord Woolf’s Warning

On his appointment as Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf warned that ‘impractical and far-fetched arguments, with little or no chance of success, would bring the Human Rights Act into disrepute and squander court resources’. He was confident that a responsible legal profession would not subject the courts to an avalanche of applications under the Act, but he expected that some people would initially be encouraged to ‘try it on’. The courts would not tolerate bad points being taken.