Fall Term Legal Studies Assignment,
Assignment for Law 51.100V,
Group #3,
Question number 3.
This third case is the most tragic in my opinion and probably most common in reality. Both Jack and Jill drown. Neither is guilty and neither can be brought to trial. The plank does not support them.
Judge Lord Coleridge would have seen his authorities like Bacon and Hale and would have had the same considerations as in R. v. Dudley and Stephens. Duty and necessity would have been considered. He may have found Jack guilty of murder in this case because of duty. But principle would have found both Jack and Jill innocent of murder.
Does morality or law have a solution to this case? Is this not the laws of nature conspiring against both Jack and Jill. Nature determines that neither can swim. Nature is such that people can die of drowning. Circumstance of being at sea and having a plank that can not support both of them add up to a tragic case won by the rule of nature. Nature is not to be meddled with lightly we learn in our geography courses. Earthquakes, hurricanes, mud slides all these natural disasters have cases of death every year yet they are not solved by legal decision.
Perhaps the act of getting on the plank is the act of murder. And thus a defence of necessity would be invoked. But this is not the case. Nor is it a case of suicide. No both get on the plank and both drown. It is not a case of murder, it is a case of bad circumstances, which could have been avoided.
So this third case points to the need for the understanding of nature and things like swimming lessons for everybody and further disaster planning. Since the time of Lord Coleridge and Dudley, Stephens, and Parker things have been remedied by groups like the Red Cross. Common law will continue to deal with problems and will be brought to deal with the environment as well.
