thingsareswinging:

mazarinedrake:

thingsareswinging:

almightysempai:

thingsareswinging:

Lawyers in this country are not sharp-dressed smartalecs with incredible hair, as all American films assure me they are on the other side of the Atlantic. Barristers and Solicitors in the UK are great ponderous blimps of human beings, wrapped in pinstripes and wigs and great flappy robes that make them look like Dracula’s socially-awkward great-uncle, and they spend all their time being extremely determinedly polite to one another and debating, in frankly incredible detail, the minute details of how one carries a handbag. They use latin phrases as a kind of verbal punctuation, and never look each other in the eye.

Admittedly, the reason that one judge famously asked for clarification on who the Beatles were was a perfectly sensible one- judges are not supposed to assume meaning for anything- but the response “a popular beat combo, m’lud”, is justifiably hilarious.

I am picturing everything perfectly unchanged from the days of David Copperfield.

the wigs and black gowns that Barristers wear is due to the entire bar collectively going into mourning following the death of Queen Anne in 1714, and I know that sounds like I just made it up but I didn’t.

So what do they do when another monarch dies, wear darker black? 

the convenient thing about being in perpetual mourning for three hundred years is you never really need to change your clothes. King dies? No worries, you put on your robe and lawyer hat, like you do every day