Dissection

'A common law power to dissect: a medico-legal history' by Joshua Shaw in (2025) 33(1) Medical Law Review states 

Comments on the legal history of anatomy and dissection in common law jurisdictions often cite three statutes. First, the Concerning Barbers and Chirurgians Act 1540, which entitled the Company of Barbers and Surgeons of London to the bodies of four executed convicts each year for the purpose of dissection. Secondly, the Murder Act 1751, which granted courts the power to sentence murderers to be dissected by members of the Company of Surgeons of London after their execution. And, finally, the Anatomy Act 1832, which repealed the Murder Act 1751 to the extent that it allowed dissection as punishment, empowered those in lawful possession of bodies to direct their use for anatomical examination, and introduced a regulatory scheme for schools where anatomical examinations took place. These statutes supplied bodies for dissection under certain conditions as exceptions to fundamental obligations at common law to effect and preserve a parishioner’s right to ‘Christian’ or ‘decent’ burial and, thus, to facilitate requirements of ecclesiastical or church law. 

The common law, in such comments, is associated with the traditional religious feeling of what ought to be done with the dead (namely, Christian or decent burial), a feeling popularly held in England at the time of the Anatomy Act 1832 and required by ecclesiastical law. Christian eschatology placed importance on burial so as to preserve the dignity of the body until resurrection at the Last Judgment, and whilst religious elites could tolerate other uses, such as dissection, burial of the body remained integral to ecclesiastical law as that was practised in England. Common law courts generally deferred to ecclesiastical administration and courts to handle disputes relating to the disposal of the dead, following the comment of Edward Coke that the dead body was of ‘ecclesiastical cognizance’. Indeed, Coke suggested that this was why no property could exist in a dead body at common law, which William Blackstone appeared to concur with whilst relying on Haynes’s Case (1614) as authority. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, common law courts increasingly clarified obligations they could enforce to facilitate ecclesiastical law. This included requiring the performance of burial from certain persons upon whom the duty to bury was placed, as well as establishing criminal offences for preventing the decent burial of the dead or disinterring the buried dead without lawful excuse. 

Legislation, in contrast, was responsible for deviations from the tradition held by the common law, deviations tolerated owing to the putative utility of modern medicine and surgery. Anatomy and dissection were thereby authorized only according to the provisions of these statutes; such acts were not otherwise lawful. That image of the law appears to have led some historians to refer to dissection outside the permissions of the Anatomy Act 1832 as illegal, for want of authority. Likewise, some jurists, relying on such histories, construct decent burial (and, more recently, cremation) as all the common law ordinarily permits; most other uses, like anatomy and dissection (outside coronial examinations), depend entirely upon legislation for their authority.  However, the historical record is more complicated than this image of the law. There were jurists who insisted that what could be done at common law was more than decent interment. Rather, the common law, by their argument, appeared to admit the existence of a power to dissect, claimed by physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries prior to and outside of legislation. 

As this article shows, to these jurists, such a power authorized and regulated dissection outside the contexts contemplated by anatomy legislation. This is important to show for at least two reasons. First, a common law power to dissect challenges the narratives ordinarily told about the history of anatomy law specifically, and the law of the dead generally, which is instructive for understanding medico-legal history in England and Wales and throughout the British Empire (where legislation could be scant, such as in the Province of Canada and Nova Scotia).  Secondly, a common law power to dissect may be extant where legislation has not displaced it, and thereby authorize certain uses of the human dead, such as dissection specifically, as well as wider uses if the power is understood to also support a more general principle that the common law did not require burial. The presumptive legality of the body’s use begins analysis at a different point, potentially allowing for a wider array of uses if not dependent on statute. That will be relevant to courts that must adjudicate ‘exceptional’ uses of the human dead or tissue and look to the historical record for guidance, such as when Justice Jackson of the High Court of Justice in England and Wales considered ‘the old authorities on the unlawful treatment of dead bodies’ with respect of the novel practice of cryonics.  Likewise, legislators and others interested in law reform affecting the disposal of the dead and the use of human bodily materials will benefit from a corrected historical record. 

As Margaret Brazier has said alone and with Jonathan Montgomery, medico-legal history assists the lawyer in examining the relationships of law and morality to medical practice, by tracing the conditions for their emergence.  Without history, ‘we waste time and effort and repeat the same mistakes’ and ‘[i]f we have only a vague notion of history, a notion unsupported by evidence, we may make bad laws today’.  I specifically engage in medico-legal history as that services doctrinal understandings of medical law, ‘us[ing] formal legal materials such as reports of decisions […] and evidence of lawyers’ argumentation and reflections, in order to reconstruct the mind of the professional legal collective as it understands its own activity in guiding conduct and resolving disputes’.  Re-examining old doctrines can disrupt the orthodoxy of current legal doctrine, suggesting alternative possibilities for law through its retelling.  Especially with the young discipline of medical law, in search of its history and the history of its subject matter,  histories of legal doctrine remain worthwhile. 

The article focuses on identifying the historical sources and elements of a common law power to dissect, as expressed by some jurists. Analysis of its broader significance, historically and to contemporary legal doctrine, merits more space than allowed here. But I do occasionally place the power to dissect in the context of bodysnatching, and the inadequate supply of bodies for dissection and anatomical examination, which precipitated the Anatomy Act 1832. Bodysnatching involved disinterring the buried dead or, more dangerously, murder, so to procure bodies for dissection and anatomical examinations. The practice emerged in response to the inadequate supply of bodies for anatomical examination, especially as private and university anatomy schools were increasingly opened in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, creating greater demand.  It is necessary for me to place the power in this context, as it will assist the reader of legal history in gaining a fuller understanding of the policies underlying the doctrine and its use. Furthermore, the context preceding the Anatomy Act 1832 also supplied at least two cases that led some from this period to conclude that anatomy and dissection were unlawful at common law.  These cases are important to analyse since they may be raised to negate the existence of a power to dissect. 

The article has three parts: first, I show where and how jurists in the common law described the power to dissect; secondly, I set out the power’s elements, particularly as it interacted with the ‘no property’ rule, criminal law, the law of tort, and any other municipal law; and thirdly, I observe how the power to dissect was threatened by concern for bodysnatching but ultimately persisted despite how certain cases were narrated.

Scams

The Scams Prevention Framework Bill has passed through the national legislature. The expectation is that it will set out consistent and enforceable obligations for businesses in key sectors, with overarching principles for compliance by all members of designated sectors. 

The ACCC has announced that the Commission will 'closely monitor regulated entities’ compliance with principles to prevent, detect, disrupt, respond to and report scams. The legislation empowers the ACCC to investigate potential breaches and take enforcement action where entities do not take reasonable steps to fulfill obligations under the principles, with fines of up to $50 million and scope for consumers to seek redress from regulated businesses. The ACCC will be involved in development of the formal designation of sectors, sector codes, and consumer and industry guidance. The initial sectors will be banks, certain digital platforms (including social media) and telecommunications providers. 

 Under the Framework, the ACCC will enforce the digital platforms sector scams code and take enforcement action where digital platforms breach obligations. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission will be the regulator for the banking sector code. The Australian Communications and Media Authority will be the regulator for the telecommunications sector code. There will be a single external dispute resolution body under the new Framework, involving the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA). 

A Treasury Minister may, by legislative instrument, designate one or more businesses or services to be a regulated sector for the purposes of the Framework. This designation instrument is subject to Parliamentary scrutiny through the disallowance process and sunsetting. The Treasury Minister may designate an individual business or service, or designate businesses or services by class, meaning that the Minister may in effect designate specific entities to be a 'regulated sector' within a designation instrument. 

 Without limiting the businesses or services that may be designated, a Treasury Minister may designate the following classes of businesses or services to be a regulated sector (or a subset of those business or services): 

 • banking businesses, other than State banking (within the meaning of paragraph 51(xiii) of the Constitution) not extending beyond the limits of the State concerned; 

• insurance businesses, other than State insurance (within the meaning of paragraph 51(xiv) of the Constitution) not extending beyond the limits of the State concerned; 

• postal, telegraphic, telephonic or other similar services (within the meaning of paragraph 51(v) of the Constitution), which can include, but is not limited to: - carriage services within the meaning of the Telecommunications Act; - electronic services within the meaning of the Online Safety Act 2021, such as social media services within the meaning of that Act; - broadcasting services within the meaning of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992. 

 The description of the businesses and services are based on the relevant constitutional heads of power and provide flexibility for the Framework to be expanded to a wide range of sectors over time. It is not intended to provide a roadmap of the exact sectors the Government is proposing to designate. The Government's intention is to initially designate telecommunications services, banking services and certain digital platform services. 

 Before designating a sector to be subject to the Framework, the Minister must consider all the following matters: 

 • Scam activity in the sector. For example, the Minister may identify that certain businesses or services experience high levels of scam activity.   

• The effectiveness of existing industry initiatives to address scams in the sector. For example, there may be existing initiatives in a sector seeking to protect against scams but do not appropriately address scam  activity in that sector.   

• The interests of persons who would be Framework consumers of regulated services for the sector if the Minister were to make the designation. For example, designation may be appropriate if the Minister considers that consumers would be better protected against scams arising out of activity in a sector if it is subject to the Framework, rather than relying on existing frameworks.   

• The likely consequences (including benefits and risks) to the public and to the businesses or services making up the sector if the Minister were to make the designation.   

• Any other matters the Minister considers relevant to the decision to designate a sector to be subject to the SPF. For example, this could include the compliance and regulatory costs of designating sectors, the privacy or confidentiality of consumers' information, the regulatory impact of designation, the outcomes of consultation with impacted entities and consumers, and scam activity in the relevant sector in another jurisdiction. 

 Before designating a sector, the Minister must also consult relevant consumer groups and the businesses or services making up the sector, or such associations or other bodies representing them as the Minister thinks appropriate. Given the nature and scope of the requirements under the Framework, this is 'appropriate to ensure consumers and affected entities are given notice of the Government's intention to designate the relevant sector. It will also provide these stakeholders with an opportunity to give feedback on the details of the designation instrument, including on any application provisions or transition period before the SPF comes into effect for the sector'.

What is a 'Scam'? The legislation seeks to provide certainty on the scope of harms intended to be captured by the Framework, with a scam being a direct or indirect attempt (whether or not successful) to engage an  Framework consumer of a regulated service where it would be reasonable to conclude that the attempt: 

 • involves deception; and 

• would, if successful, cause loss or harm including the obtaining of SPF personal information of, or a benefit (such as a financial benefit) from, the SPF consumer or the SPF consumer's associates. 

 The elements of the definition of 'scam' are objective in nature and do not require the scammer's state of mind to be established. This definition is deliberately broad to capture the wide range of activities scammers engage in and their ability to adapt and to adopt evolving behaviours over time. The Framework rules can also provide an appropriate safeguard to exclude conduct that is not intended to be captured under the Framework. 

 The definition of scam captures both successful scams which have caused loss or harm to a Framework consumer, and scam attempts which have not yet resulted in loss or harm to a Framework consumer. This reflects the obligations in the principles, which require regulated entities to take action against scams, regardless of whether the scam has resulted in loss or harm to a Framework consumer or an associate of the consumer. The use of 'attempt' in the definition of scam has its ordinary meaning, which is intended to cover efforts made to engage a Framework consumer. There may be an attempt to engage a Framework consumer even if the attempt is indirect, such as where it is directed at a cohort which includes the consumer or is directed at the public more generally. The attempt to engage an SPF consumer may be a single act or a course of conduct. 

 The legislation introduce the concept of an 'SPF consumer'. The obligations imposed on regulated entities are often in relation to a Framework consumer. This is intended to clearly set out the scope of obligations under the Framework and who they are designed to protect.  A Framework consumer of a regulated service is: • a natural person, or a small business operator, who is or may be provided or purportedly provided the service in Australia; or • a natural person who is ordinarily resident in Australia and is or may be provided or purportedly provided the service outside of Australia by a regulated entity that is either an Australian resident or is providing or purportedly providing the service through a permanent establishment in Australia.  The meaning of 'Australian resident' and 'permanent establishment' with respect to the regulated entity in this context leverages the existing established definitions in the ITAA 1997. 

A Framework consumer is intended to cover any natural person or small business operator who is in Australia when they are provided the regulated service, regardless of where that service is based (for example, the regulated service may be based overseas). This includes natural persons who are only temporarily in Australia. The definition also intends to cover any natural person who is ordinarily resident in Australia but is overseas when they are provided a regulated service that is based in Australia. A Framework consumer could be 

 • an Australian resident in Australia using either an Australian-based or overseas-based messaging service that is offered in Australia; 

• a person ordinarily resident in Australia who is overseas but using an Australian-based banking service; or 

• a tourist visiting Australia using an Australian-based or overseas-based telecommunication service that is offered in Australia. 

 It is not intended that a foreign entity will be regulated with respect to consumers in foreign markets. For example, where an Australian consumer is overseas and is impacted by a scam on a social media service offered by an entity based overseas, this is not intended to be within the scope of the Framework. 

 Small businesses are not excluded from being Framework consumers based on their corporate structure. The small business may be in the form of a sole trader, company, unincorporated association, partnership or trust. Whether a small business is a small business operator for the purposes of the Framework will differ slightly depending on whether the small business is a body corporate or not.  

If a small business is a body corporate, it is a small business operator if it meets all of the following conditions: • the sum of the business' employees and the employees of any body corporate related to the business, is less than 100 employees; • the annual turnover of the business during the last financial year is less than $10 million; and • the business has a principal place of business in Australia.   If a small business is not a body corporate, it is a small business operator if it meets all of the following conditions: • the business has less than 100 employees; • the annual turnover of the business, worked out as if the person were a body corporate, during the last financial year is less than $10 million; and • the business has a principal place of business in Australia.

Justice

'What if animals are moral agents?' by Taimie L. Bryant in (2024) 109 Cornell Law Review 1734 comments 

In an essay titled Should Animals Be Able to Sue People?, Professor Sherry Colb considers Justice v. Vercher, a lawsuit brought by Justice, a horse seeking damages for injuries resulting from his previous owner’s gross negligence. Gwendolyn Vercher had already been convicted of animal cruelty and paid the statutorily required restitution, but that restitution was limited to costs incurred for Justice’s care up to the time of the hearing. Justice will need specialized lifelong care. Represented by the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Justice brought suit in his own name for monetary damages sufficient to cover those costs. Vercher responded with a motion to dismiss on the ground that Justice lacked standing to sue her. 

Among other arguments in opposition to the idea of Justice having standing to sue, Colb considers the argument that Justice is not a “legal person” because he lacks the ability to fulfill legal duties, which is frequently viewed by courts as necessary for holding legal rights. As Colb puts it, there is an “idea that only those who can respect others’ rights are entitled to rights of their own.” Colb agrees that Justice does not have a legal obligation to respect the rights of humans or other animals, but she analogizes Justice’s situation to that of infants and cognitively incapacitated humans whose rights are recognized and protected without such a requirement of capacity to respect others’ rights or to bear duties in relation to them. Known as the “argument from marginal cases,” it is a claim that recognizing animals as holders of rights (even if limited) is required as a matter of justice arising from the requirement that like entities be treated alike. For Colb, animals’ likeness to humans lies in their sentience, not in their cognitive capacities or their ability to perform legal duties to others. Thus, they should be included in the moral community, and their membership in that community should be reflected in the law in the form of rights and standing to enforce those rights. 

Colb also argues that Justice is the logical plaintiff because he is the actual victim of wrongdoing. This critical point can be missed during abstract debate about whether or not a horse can or should be recognized as the plaintiff in a lawsuit. No one doubts that Vercher lacked the right as Justice’s owner to starve him, fail to provide shelter for him during severe weather conditions, or allow his skin to deteriorate for lack of cleaning and appropriate medical care. No one doubts that Justice is the intended beneficiary of the anticruelty statutes under which Vercher was convicted. What they doubt is that those statutes confer legal rights or that Justice himself should be able to sue her in his own name. Something gets in the way of accepting that the actual, direct victim of acts explicitly recognized under the law as wrongful should be able to sue in their own name, even if that victim is an animal. Yet, if not Justice, who would have standing to seek the restitution needed to address the harm inflicted on Justice? Legal standing to address harm to animals is notoriously difficult. Animals cannot yet sue in their own names, and humans cannot reliably redress wrongs to animals except in limited situations in which an owner of an injured or killed animal seeks redress for harm to their property. Animals are not yet understood by courts or legislatures as the sort of beings entitled to be “legal persons.” 

Whether an animal can be a legal person was raised also in the case of Happy, an elephant living a solitary life in a grossly insufficient enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. Unlike Justice’s case, Happy’s case was not grounded in tort law. Seeking Happy’s transfer to an appropriate sanctuary, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a writ of habeas corpus petition on her behalf. Two lower courts rejected the petition on the ground that the writ could not be used for nonhumans because they are not legal persons, basing their decisions on the jurisdiction’s precedent established in a habeas case involving a chimpanzee. The Nonhuman Rights Project filed an appeal in the New York Court of Appeals, seeking to challenge that precedent and to secure for Happy a writ that would allow justice to be done in the form of moving her to a sanctuary where her needs could be met. However, the New York Court of Appeals ultimately adopted the reasoning and outcome of the lower courts. The courts’ reasoning was much the same as in Justice v. Vercher: Animals cannot be legal persons because they are not humans and cannot be holders of legal duties. It is not clear that social contract theory, with its apparently required linkage of rights and duties, is particularly helpful for understanding the recognition of rights and duties of humans, let alone animals. Nevertheless, as it is currently understood, social contract theory forecloses animals from the community of legal rights-holders, even if they are understood to hold moral rights. 

While the matter was pending, Professor Colb, Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe, and Professor Michael Dorf submitted an amicus brief addressing the contention that Happy could not be a legal person because the ability to bear duties is necessary for having rights. They argued that Happy is a legal person for purposes of New York’s common law writ of habeas corpus, “which has a noble tradition of expanding the ranks of rights-holders,” and that it is a matter of justice that the Court recognize it in this case, as it had in previous habeas corpus cases involving enslaved individuals, women, children, and others not recognized at the time as having any type of autonomous legal status.  On a case-by-case basis, the courts had considered as a matter of justice—not rights—whether to provide relief through the “Great Writ.” The writ is designed to promote justice, not simply to validate or reject the status of a petitioner as a legal person. Whether or not Happy meets some standard of rights and duty-holding, it is unjust, the amicus brief authors wrote, for the court to deny the writ petition of Happy, a sentient, social being with complex cognitive capacities forcibly brought to this country and kept in isolation from others of her species in an enclosure with grossly insufficient space for her needs, simply because she is not a human. Noting that the request for relief was as modest as those that led to historical uses of the writ, the authors pointed out that granting the writ in Happy’s case would not result in a change in her legal status in all conceivable contexts; it would result only in her moving from a harmful environment to a sanctuary where she would suffer less and have greater ability to flourish. Nor would it result in a change of the legal status of other animals; a writ corrects injustice only in the limited ways and contexts spelled out in the writ. 

To animal protectionists, legal recognition of animals like Justice and Happy as legal persons is a matter of social justice, whether or not they have legal rights. The Nonhuman Rights Project’s legal representation of Happy resonates most strongly with that position since the writ of habeas corpus had been used previously to promote justice for those who lacked legal rights. But this just raises questions about the nature of “social justice” and the sort of being that can be the focus of social justice claims. Black’s Law Dictionary defines “social justice” as “[a] fair and proper administration of the laws that conform to the natural law that covers all people regardless of gender, origin, possessions or religion” and further points to the definition of “civil rights.” In short, it is a conception of justice that connects legal structures to “natural law,” with humans as its focus. Animals are not humans, and so animal protectionists must make three arguments to support the claim that animals should be protected as a matter of social justice. First, they must argue that animals are sufficiently like humans such that justice requires treating them alike. Second, they must argue that “like treatment” means bearing legal rights. Third, they must argue that justice also requires legal opportunity to enforce the rights they hold. No animal protectionist has ever argued that comparability to humans should result in the same rights that humans hold. For instance, no one has yet argued that animals should have legal voting rights, although Christopher Stone and Robin Wall Kimmerer have come close. 

As to the first matter (sufficient similarity to humans), animal protectionists have argued that animals are similar enough to humans because of sentience or cognitive capacity. Treating sentience (the capacity to suffer) as the standard of comparison results in the inclusion of the most animals in the moral community but limits the reach of legal rights to preventing the infliction of suffering. This is the standard basis of state anticruelty statutes, although any amount of human-inflicted suffering is allowed under those laws if there is “necessity.” “Necessity” sweeps broadly to include any treatment or use of animals that benefits humans. Thus, anticruelty statutes protect only against purely gratuitous, senseless infliction of severe suffering and death. Moreover, as the Vercher case shows, animals lack standing to use the law even in those situations. 

Advocacy for animals based on their similar cognitive capacity to humans covers fewer types of animals, although the types of animals demonstrated to have such capacity has grown to include animals as diverse as whales, elephants, dogs, and bees. As in the case of sentience as a basis, recognition of the human-like cognitive capacity of some animals has resulted in very few legal benefits specific to that ability. For instance, primates can still be used in experiments without restraints on research design that requires their enduring horrific suffering and elephants can still be kept in cramped enclosures, but their housing must include opportunities for intellectual stimulation. Unfortunately, the animals themselves and those who care about them lack standing to enforce even those limited protections. 

This Article identifies a specific capacity—animals’ capacity to make moral decisions and to act morally—to consider whether recognition of that capacity as similar to humans’ moral capacity justifies inclusion in the community of legal rights-holders with the legal opportunity to enforce those rights. At the heart of the argument that animals must be able to bear legal obligations in order to have rights is an argument about moral agency. As Matthew Kramer has written, “[t]o bear a legal obligation is simply to be placed under it,” and meaningful comprehension of the obligation is a “separate matter.” As it is now, billions of animals are placed under the obligation to serve the interests of humans in research, entertainment, and food production. What is meant by “holding duties” then is actually “voluntarily and knowingly holding duties as morally binding obligations.” Even as to humans, this is not particularly convincing, but where animals are concerned, a deeper problem is that animals are not believed to be capable of holding duties as a moral matter at all because they are not understood to have moral agency. Only humans capable of abstract reasoning about moral behavior and members of the archetypal class of humans (such as infants and cognitively impaired humans) are considered to have moral agency sufficient to hold duties and thus hold rights. 

Animal protectionists often accept the characterization of animals as lacking moral agency and use the argument from marginal cases to defend their view that animals should be protected despite their lack of moral agency, just as many humans (children and those with cognitive incapacity) lack moral agency. However, this view should be reconsidered in light of emerging scholarship revealing that the type of moral decision-making by at least some animals is comparable to that of humans. Instead of focusing narrowly on whether animals canhold obligations and duties towards humans who would bear reciprocal duties towards animals, it could prove fruitful and just to consider whether animals have moral consciousness that leads to morally-based behaviors and, if so, whether their ability to make and act on moral decisions makes our failure to protect them as legal persons unconscionable.

Performativity

In the matter of an application by Uncle Robbie Thorpe for special leave to appeal [2024] HCASL 315 Edelman and Jagot JJ refused Special Leave to Appeal, stating 

 The applicant requires an extension of time within which to seek special leave to appeal from a judgment of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of Victoria (McLeish JA), which refused the applicant's application for a direction to a Registrar to accept documents for filing. 

The applicant's proposed grounds of appeal have no prospects of success. It would therefore be futile to grant the extension of time that is sought.

In Re Thorpe [2024] VSCA 172 the Supreme Court stated

In October 2023, Uncle Robbie Thorpe (‘the applicant’) sought to file a charge sheet and summons in the Magistrates’ Court of Victoria naming King Charles III as the accused and alleging that he had committed ‘continuing acts of genocide ... against First Peoples’. 

The court refused to issue the summons and did not initiate a proceeding. By originating motion filed in the Trial Division on 7 March 2024, the applicant sought judicial review of that decision. A trial was conducted on 19 July 2024 and the matter stands reserved for judgment. After judgment was reserved, the applicant filed two further affidavits affirmed on 22 July 2024. He also sought to file a third affidavit. The judge refused leave in relation to that affidavit, but indicated that an outline of submissions, draft minutes of order and addendum to the authorities relied on which were exhibited to that affidavit would be considered by the judge in deciding the case. On 23 July 2024 the applicant was advised, through the judge’s associate, that the judge considered that the balance of the affidavit did not concern any issue for determination in the proceeding. The decision was not made the subject of any order. 

The applicant then sought to file documents in the Registry of the Court of Appeal via RedCrest, including an application for leave to appeal the judge’s decision not to accept the third affidavit. The Registrar rejected the documents for filing. The applicant was advised by email that the Registrar considered that the ruling that he sought to challenge was not a decision from which an appeal could lie to the Court of Appeal. As a result, the Court did not have jurisdiction to consider the proposed application for leave to appeal, and the documents that had been submitted were ‘substantially irregular’.