Comments on: Sex, Lies, and Petroleum: Lord John Browne http://blog.oup.com/2007/05/john_browne/ Introducing brilliant authors to the blogosphere. Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:43:07 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Joanne Moss http://blog.oup.com/2007/05/john_browne/comment-page-1/#comment-5137 Joanne Moss Fri, 18 May 2007 09:19:18 +0000 http://blog.oup.com/2007/05/john_browne/#comment-5137 Interesting blog. As a practising (UK) trial lawyer, sadly, I have seen quite a lot of self-interested lying and several civil cases where the file was referred on for perjury assessment.Judges mostly accept a degree of invention but not the deliberate destructive or endemic sort. The other point to be made is that the law of defamation often attracts reckless claimant liars desperate for better PR. You might usefully add Oscar Wilde to your list. Interesting blog.
As a practising (UK) trial lawyer, sadly, I have seen quite a lot of self-interested lying and several civil cases where the file was referred on for perjury assessment.Judges mostly accept a degree of invention but not the deliberate destructive or endemic sort.
The other point to be made is that the law of defamation often attracts reckless claimant liars desperate for better PR. You might usefully add Oscar Wilde to your list.

]]> By: Tony http://blog.oup.com/2007/05/john_browne/comment-page-1/#comment-5133 Tony Fri, 18 May 2007 08:26:34 +0000 http://blog.oup.com/2007/05/john_browne/#comment-5133 In my innocence I had imagined that lying under oath is a criminal offence and that its heinousness does not depend on the size or the impact of the lie. It seems to me that not prosecuting is telling all titans of industry that perjury is OK provided the matter is not too important. It seems specious to suggest that since the truth came out quickly and the matter on which he lied is of no public interest (or shouldn't be) the offence is trifling. I would have said that a prosecution would have been salutary and of course the sentence could have been merely a suspended one to reflect the points you have made about the triviality of the whole thing. By the way, he is not "Lord John Browne": he is just Lord Browne. In my innocence I had imagined that lying under oath is a criminal offence and that its heinousness does not depend on the size or the impact of the lie. It seems to me that not prosecuting is telling all titans of industry that perjury is OK provided the matter is not too important.

It seems specious to suggest that since the truth came out quickly and the matter on which he lied is of no public interest (or shouldn’t be) the offence is trifling. I would have said that a prosecution would have been salutary and of course the sentence could have been merely a suspended one to reflect the points you have made about the triviality of the whole thing.

By the way, he is not “Lord John Browne”: he is just Lord Browne.

]]>