Charles Auld of our Commercial and Chancery team, and Kate Harrington of Magdalen Chambers have collaborated again, this time in an article published on 12th February by New Law Journal, which questions why the coronavirus regulations have become so incredibly convoluted.
The article outlines briefly the Byzantine complexities of the current regulations and asks: as everybody is supposed to be following these regulations, is it too much to expect that they be drafted so that most people can actually understand them? It cannot be right that people have to consult lawyers to check whether Granny can come to supper one evening or whether they can stop and talk to a friend they meet when out on a walk. However most people don’t read the actual regulations: rather they rely on pictures and diagrams produced by the media. So why doesn’t the government do the same and issue at least some of the regulations in diagrams and pictures? After all, there are precedents for appropriate parts of our legislation to be pictorial.