IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
PTA 2000/5919/CCOURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
DIVISIONAL COURT
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London WC2
Monday, 8th May 2000
B e f o r e :
LORD JUSTICE KAY
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HER MAJESTY'S ATTORNEY GENERAL
Claimant/Respondent
-v-
FRANCIS HODGSON Defendant/Applicant
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Computer Aided Transcript of the Palantype Notes of
Smith Bernal Reporting Limited
180 Fleet Street London EC4A 2HG
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The Applicant Defendant did not appear and was not represented.
The Respondent Claimant did not appear and was not represented.
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J U D G M E N T
(As Approved by the Court)
1. LORD JUSTICE KAY: In this matter the applicant, who seeks an extension of time in which to appeal and permission to appeal, has not appeared. There has been no explanation for his failure to appear. The Civil Appeals Office wrote to him on 12th April informing him in clear terms of the date of this hearing. No written reply has been received in any way suggesting that he would not attend, nor is there any record of any communication from him by telephone, and certainly nothing has been heard from him today.
2. I have considered carefully the papers in this case. The matter is one which in my judgment is so clearly unarguable that it seems to me to be serving no useful purpose to adjourn the matter further. In those circumstances I propose to make an order, for reasons which I shall explain briefly in a moment, refusing the applicant’s applications. That order will not become effective until 4.00pm today. If the applicant does attend later and it is possible to hear him, then the order will not be effective and I will hear him and reconsider the matter afresh.
3. My reasons for coming to the conclusion that this matter is unarguable can briefly be stated as follows. The applicant seeks permission to appeal against a decision of Lord Justice Leggatt and Sir Iain Glidewell, sitting as a Divisional Court of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court, on 22nd March 1996. By that decision the applicant was prohibited from:
(a)instituting any civil proceedings in any court;
(b)continuing any civil proceedings instituted by him in any court before the making of the order; and
(c)making any applications other than an application for leave as required by section 42 of the Supreme Court Act 1981, other than with the permission of the High Court (a civil proceedings order).
4. The application for permission to appeal is out of time and the applicant seeks permission to extend the time.
5. The facts of the various actions which the applicant has instigated are laid out in the judgment of Lord Justice Leggatt. I see no purpose, in all the circumstances, in setting them out fully. There were many such applications. Lord Justice Leggatt commenced his judgment by reviewing the terms of section 42, as amended. He then proceeded to detail the background to the Attorney General’s application, including a review of the applicant’s many pieces of litigation. Lord Justice Leggatt concluded his review by stating:
“Mr Hodgson differed from the ordinary run of litigants accused of being vexatious in that he did not strike me as a mean-spirited person seeking to harass a succession of luckless victims, as is often the case. On the contrary, he seemed to me to have a conscientious belief that he had a right of which the courts had not accorded him the benefit. He also showed, however, a continuing obdurate failure to appreciate that his correct remedy, if dissatisfied with a judgment, had been to appeal against it. Instead, he has commenced either fresh proceedings against the same defendants, and in particular the insurance company, or proceedings against a Court or its Chief Clerk ...
The result has been that General Accident Plc have been subjected over a period of three years or so to what is nothing short of a campaign of actions and applications which, however explicable Mr Hodgson’s intentions, required them, quite unwarrantably, to defend themselves against a series of accusations by him.”
6. Lord Justice Leggatt concluded that:
“From the point of view of the persons at the receiving end of Mr Hodgson’s litigation, whether insurance company, court staff, judges or others, it was habitual, persistent and without reasonable cause. In the light of the fact that Mr Hodgson has had nine of his actions struck out, almost all for abuse of process, and that he has had innumerable applications dismissed as misconceived, we must conclude that he has conducted himself as an increasingly vexatious litigant against whom it is the purpose of section 42 of the Act of 1981 and the duty of the Court to afford protection.”
7. Lord Justice Leggatt did point out that the order had a safety valve attached, in that it was open to Mr Hodgson to institute or continue litigation if he first obtained the leave of the High Court.
8. The mere giving of the date of that decision would indicate that this is an application for an extension of time requiring a very, very long extension indeed - the best part of four years. In those circumstances it is incumbent upon the applicant to explain the delay. His explanation is that he has only recently discovered the terms of Magna Carta. From that it will be seen that one of the grounds of his application for permission is that he contends that there is a conflict between Magna Carta and section 42 of the Supreme Court Act 1981. The relevant part of chapter 29 of Magna Carta states:
“No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be dismissed of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or in any other wise destroyed; nor will we pass upon him, nor [condemn him] but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either justice or right.”
9. I anticipate that the point that the applicant contends has some bearing upon the matter is the denial of justice by the fact that he is no longer able to make applications without permission. However, the fact that he can make applications with permission immediately renders the point he seeks to make ineffective. He is not being denied justice. Equally, nor are those against whom he has started (vexatiously, as the court found) litigation denied justice, in that they do not have to expend money unless and until such time as the court is satisfied that there is some proper basis upon which the application or action is being commenced. In those circumstances the point is wholly without merit.
10. The other point that he makes is that the matter was heard by two judges. He contends that he would have stood a much better chance of persuading the court that he was right if he had merely had to persuade a single judge. The point is a bad one. The constitution of the court is determined by Order 94, rule 15(1) of the Rules of the Supreme Court. The relevant part requiring that there be two judges arose from the Rules of the Supreme Court (Amendment No. 2) 1988 which was passed by Parliament. Parliament has specified the need for two judges to consider this matter. It was therefore right that there should have been two judges and no merit at all is to be attached to that point. It should equally be pointed out that there is no reason to think, in the circumstances, that the mere fact that there were two judges in any way had any bearing upon the outcome.
11. From that short summary it will be seen that there really is no merit at all in these applications. It is impossible to see how, even with oral argument before me today (which the applicant has chosen not to advance), he could in any way persuade the Court of Appeal that he has an arguable case. For those reasons I would dismiss his applications, subject to the provision that I made earlier that, if he does attend before 4.00pm today and wishes to address the court, this order will not become effective until that time.
ORDER: applications dismissed; order not to be drawn up before 4.00pm today.
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