Life in the High Court
As part of my experience as an expert witness, I once got an assignment in the London High Court, which is the court of England and Wales where civil cases are tried. While the American legal system is based on English Common Law, it is fair to say that the two systems are still very different. According to the textbooks, English Common Law is controlled by a combination of statutes, starting with the Magna Carta, and then modified by case law or judicial interpretation. That is quite different that American Common Law, which certainly relies on both case law and statutes (even more so these days), but always defaults to the Constitution to resolve interpretations. Not being a lawyer, or even a solicitor or barrister, as an expert witness I am more constrained by civil procedure than the actual adjudication process. In the American system, experts work for either the plaintiff or the defendant, and specifically take direction from the lawyers representing one or the other. But in the English civil court system, an expert witness works for the judge in the case. They are required to work with the judge to resolve the issue at hand rather than argue a perspective favoring one side or the other. In the case I was working, the judge wanted me to meet with an collaborate with the opposing witness. He asked that we resolve as many of our differences as we could and get to a point where we had as few differences and conflicting views as possible. Needless to say, this was a very different approach that felt unusual to someone just getting used to the American expert witness program. The program calls for a far more adversarial approach with each side going to its corner for one round of rebuttals after another until both sides tire of the battle.
As it turned out, that case went through several written rejoinders when COVID intervened and prevented a planned and even scheduled trip by me to London to meet with the opposing expert who needed only to travel in by train from Surry. At the time I remember thinking the guy was overreacting to this COVID thing. In hindsight he made the right call and ai went home to my hilltop to begin a longer COVID quarantine then any of us predicted. During that time, the two sides to the lawsuit decided to take the 400 pages of expert reports and use them to negotiate a solid and fair settlement. I’m not sure if COVID or the High Court process deserves the credit for lightening the judicial docket of the high court, but it worked nonetheless.
It was George Bernard Shaw that famously said that the United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language. that is more tue than you can imagine unless you have lived it in one direction of the other. I did live in London once for six months, but it was really only living in a service flat, so it was only half-way living, but it was enough to make me aware of all of the difference between the two countries and cultures. The transition in the atmosphere of the City of London (meaning the financial district) was quite pronounced between when I started traveling there on business in 1979 and when I finally moved on from running businesses with London offices in 2007. It used to be a far more different business environment back then that’s it is now. I think it is fair to say that London has been Americanized, Europeanized and globalized, or some combination of the three. the story I like to tell about 1979 is gettin in a taxi at the Savoy Hotel at 8:30am and asking to go to our office a mile away in the City. the cabby turned and looked at me and said, “a bit early for offices, ain’t it, Governor?” I came to understand that the comment was less about the cabby and more about the work ethic in London. 8:30am really was a bit early. In NYC at the time, but 8:30 the joint was jumping.
One area where England has retained a good deal of its prior glory is in the academic arena. If you think of wealthy Middle Easterners, the older generation always sent their kids to England for schooling, almost like a colonial heritage. Climbing the ladder of success in the Empire required a degree from Oxford or Cambridge and preferably a secondary base from Eton or Harrow. Interestingly, the next generation of Middle easterners largely preferred to go to the U.S. for college. But thanks in part to the not-so-faded image of Oxford and Cambridge, bolstered no doubt by the existence of well-endowed scholarship programs like the Rhodes and Marshall Scholar programs as well as the Fulbright and Churchill Scholarships, Oxford and Cambridge have continued to sit on a pedestal Fetty much by themselves despite the envy and arguments of American schools like Harvard, Yale and Stanford.
When I was actively engaged as a Clinical Professor at Cornell’s Business School for ten years, I witnessed first-hand the combination of the power of the American business school brand and the gradual infiltration of more and more global business schools into the ranks of qualified, good and even superior business schools that were NOT in the U.S. At this point in time, fully half of the top ten business schools are non-U.S. with England and the EU claiming the other five. But in terms of overall university rankings, only two of the top ten are non-U.S. and they are Oxford and Cambridge. When at Cornell, I chaired the search committee for a new Dean and we landed on a guy from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, a highly ranked and respected global school that was making strides in the rankings. He and I became good friends while he was at Cornell and I was both a mentor and sponsor to him, but also one of his adjunct faculty members. He left Cornell about a year ago after being the Dean of the graduate Business Program and then the Founding Dean of the newly combined College of Business at Cornell, incorporating the graduate business program, the undergraduate business program and the famous School of Hotel Management. He landed as the new Dean of the Said Graduate School of Business of Oxford University.
He emailed me last week and said he was in San Diego fro a few days and could we meet. We got together for breakfast in La Jolla, where he was staying and we updated each other on our lives and doings. I was extremely curious to hear about his life at Oxford. Very few other assignments would have interested me as much. He told me about the challenges of learning to work through the 39-college system that has existed for 800+ years at Oxford. He told me about living in a 600-year-old house that he has been provided in Oxford, about a fifty minute train ride from central London. With all the description of pomp and ceremony, not to mention robes and tuxedos, it sounds very much like a Harry Potter movie at Hogwarts. He is a member of Balliol College, one of the most prestigious of the lot, but he is not yet clear on what duties he will owe to the college.
He has asked me to come over to Oxford to give a guest lecture and when he heard about my collaborating on the writing of several books, he said we should also co-author a book together. I now have two new goals to sort out by later this year. I have to prepare and schedule a lecture on an appropriate and approved topic (he has explained that the vetting process for such things at Oxford is quite specific and rigorous). And, I now have to come up with some ideas that fit with his domain expertise, which is IT policy and AI implementation. Just as I am thinking of winding down my academic career, I get called to re-engage in life in the high court again. All I can say is that I have a tuxedo if needed, but will have to borrow a black robe if its called for. If a powdered wig is required I’m in big trouble.