The Docket: Three Cases, One Reversal

The facts are not disputed. She drove past his road anyway. It cost her four minutes. It ran for two years and it ended in June, when she began leaving twenty minutes earlier for reasons of her own and simply did not offer.

He has not asked. She has not explained. They work eight feet apart and it has now been ten weeks.

She is not wrong. A favour is not a contract and it does not vest with time; the fact that something has happened two hundred times does not convert it into a thing you owe. Anybody who has ever quietly kept a kindness going past the point where they wanted to will recognise the trap.

The note is this: she is not wrong to have stopped, and she is wrong to have said nothing, and those are two different findings. Nine words in June would have cost her less than ten weeks of eight feet has. The court does not require an explanation. The court observes that she is now paying interest on not giving one.

The claim, as put to this court, is that the recipe is family property, that it was given to him in confidence, and that publishing it was a breach.

The court has read the recipe. It is four ingredients and a technique, and the technique is the interesting part and he described it well. It is not a trade secret. It is not, on the evidence submitted, even unusual.

The objection is not really about the recipe and everybody involved knows it. It is about who gets to be the one who carries the thing forward, and he took that role without a vote, in public, with a photograph.

Finding for the respondent. A recipe held by one living person is a recipe one funeral away from being lost, and the cousins have had eleven years to write it down. But the court notes he could have sent it to the three of them first, on the same afternoon, and that this would have cost him nothing and bought him everything.

Three weeks ago this paper found for a reader whose neighbour had kept a borrowed ladder for eight months, on the reasoning that eight months is not borrowing, it is possession.

The neighbour has now written in. He has had the ladder for eight months because it was returned to him twice, by the reader, who each time said keep it, you use it more than I do. There is a message thread. The court has seen the thread.

That is not the same case. That is a gift that neither party wanted to name as a gift, and the reader's complaint is not that the ladder is missing but that the arrangement has never been said out loud, which was also true of the lift in the first case in this issue and I do not think that is a coincidence.

Reversed. And a note to anybody thinking of writing in: this court can only rule on what it is sent. When a verdict flatters you completely, that is worth about four seconds of suspicion before you screenshot it.

The ladder reversal has made me want to say this plainly rather than leave it as a running joke in the masthead.

A submission is a person's own account of a dispute, composed after the fact, by somebody who has already decided they are right — otherwise they would not be writing. That is not dishonesty. Nobody sends me a lie. What they send me is the version that survived being thought about for three weeks in the shower.

What drops out of that version is almost never a fact. It is a sentence somebody said early on, or a thing the writer did in the first week that no longer fits the shape of the story. The ladder was returned twice. That was not concealed from me; it simply was not part of the story any more by the time it reached me.

So the honest description of this paper is that it rules on submissions, not on events. I have been writing verdicts for two years and that distinction is the only thing I have learned that I would insist on.