The first sentence of the judgment is a date. The second is the weather. Lord Denning is here because he understood, long before anyone put it in a writing manual, that a reader who does not care in the first line will not care in the tenth, and that a case is a story about people before it is a question of law.
He came, in the words of his Inn of Court, “from relatively humble origins.” He read mathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford, served in the First World War as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, in France and Belgium in 1918, and was called to the bar in 1923. He became a judge of the High Court in 1944 and stayed a judge for thirty-eight years: the High Court, the Court of Appeal, the House of Lords, where he sat from 1957 as a crossbencher belonging to no party, and then the Court of Appeal again as Master of the Rolls, where he did not retire until he was eighty-three. He died on March 5, 1999, at a hundred, and shortly before his death he inspired the society that still carries his name at Lincoln’s Inn, open to members of the Inn who hold its scholarships or bursaries. The career is enormous and this page is not about the career. It is about how he began a judgment.
Three openings, each a complete sentence, each from the first lines of a Lord Denning judgment. “It was bluebell time in Kent.” “In summertime, village cricket is the delight of everyone.” “It all started in a public house.” A justice of the United Kingdom Supreme Court, speaking in 2021 to the judges of Ireland about how he writes, quoted all three from the reports, called the third “my own particular favourite,” and said what every lawyer in the common-law world already knew, that “We are all familiar with the style of a Lord Denning judgment and its distinctive openings,” before listing them. He said, of the judges of that era, “How much easier it was to read and understand Lord Denning and Lord Wilberforce than it was to absorb dry sub-clause after sub-clause of a Lord Diplock judgment.” That is the whole argument for the style, made by a judge who has to write a great many judgments himself. Ease is not a decoration. It is the difference between a decision that is read and one that is filed.
The bluebells belong to an injury case. “It happened on 19th April 1964. It was bluebell time in Kent.” The case is Hinz v Berry, decided in 1970, and it dealt with damages for nervous shock, which is the old name for the psychiatric injury a person suffers from witnessing a catastrophe. Another justice of the Supreme Court, lecturing in 2024 on liability for mental injury, opened with the picture of the problem, which he said he had taken, slightly adapted, from that famous case: a driver “carelessly crashes his car into a family picnic by the roadside,” “killing the father and seriously injuring one of the children,” and “The mother sees the accident.” The rule the court applied, as he summarized it, was that “damages were available in the typical case only for a recognisable form of mental injury,” not for grief by itself. And he added, half a century on, that “The case is perhaps more memorable for Lord Denning MR’s opening line.” Read that as the lesson, not as a criticism. The line between grief and illness is one of the hardest in the law of damages, and Denning did not ask his reader to draw it in the abstract. He put the reader on a roadside in Kent, in April, with the flowers out, and let the reader feel what the mother lost before he explained what the law could and could not pay for.
Not everyone admires it, and the objection deserves a hearing. An Australian law journal, in 2015, caught the tone of the skeptics in one sentence: “‘It was bluebell time in Kent’, we say, and roll our eyes,” and it called his voice a “naïve populism.” The eye-rolling names a real risk. A story told to move the reader can be a story told to steer the reader past the law, and a lawyer who learns only the opening and not the discipline underneath it will write briefs that a judge sees through by the second page. The answer is not to stop telling the story. It is to tell it true, with the date and the place and the people exactly as the record has them, and then to do the law in full, so that the opening earns the analysis and the analysis repays the opening. Denning’s first lines have lasted because the judgments that followed them held up on the point that mattered, which is the only reason anyone remembers the weather.
Why he is here. Ross Guberman, whose Point Made is the book of legal writing these pages are built on, went on to study the judges in Point Taken, which examines the opinions of thirty-four of them, and the review of that book in the American Judges Association’s journal lists Lord Denning among the former judges it studies, beside Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand and Robert Jackson, who have pages here, and Roger Traynor, who has one now. What a trial lawyer takes from Denning is not British and not judicial. It is the first sentence of a demand letter, of a motion, of an opening statement. A date. A place. A person doing an ordinary thing on an ordinary day, in a sentence short enough to say in one breath, the way Orwell said to cut and Garner teaches to open. The adjuster, the judge and the juror are the same reader. They will follow a mother to a roadside in April. They will not follow a party of the first part anywhere.
So begin with the day. Name the road and the hour and what the people were doing before anything went wrong, in words a child could read aloud, and only then turn to the law. Then do the law completely, because the story has bought you the reader’s attention and nothing else; the rest has to be earned. And when someone rolls their eyes, remember that they still remember the line.
Alfred Thompson Denning, Lord Denning (1899 to 1999); mathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford; second lieutenant, Royal Engineers, 151st Field Company, France and Belgium, 1918; called to the bar, 1923; judge of the High Court, 1944; a member of the House of Lords from April 24, 1957, sitting as a crossbencher from May 15, 1957; Master of the Rolls; retired at eighty-three; died March 5, 1999. Sources: Lincoln’s Inn, the Denning Society (humble origins, called in 1923, a judge for thirty-eight years, the return to the Court of Appeal as Master of the Rolls, retirement at eighty-three, death aged a hundred in 1999); the UK Parliament’s page for Lord Denning (the Lords from April 24, 1957, to March 5, 1999; crossbench); Imperial War Museums, Lives of the First World War (the war service, Oxford, 1923, 1944, the death in Winchester on March 5, 1999); Lord Burrows, Judgment-Writing: A Personal Perspective (May 20, 2021; the three openings, with Hinz v Berry [1970] 2 QB 40, Miller v Jackson [1977] QB 966 and Heywood v Wellers [1976] QB 446, and the comparison with Lord Diplock); Lord Briggs, Liability for Mental Injury (January 19, 2024; the roadside picture adapted from Hinz, the recognisable-mental-injury rule, and the opening line); Courthouse Libraries BC, Bluebell time in Kent (the first two sentences of the judgment and its subject); Desmond Manderson, Literature in Law, UNSW Law Journal (2015) (the eye-rolling and the populism); Steve Leben, Writing Like the Best Judges, Court Review (2015) (the judges Point Taken studies) and Oxford University Press on Point Taken (thirty-four judges). General information, not legal advice.
