COMMENT | Reading law can be fun

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

- Henry David Thoreau, diary entry.

COMMENT | When US attorney-general Philander Knox was asked by then-president Franklin D Roosevelt to provide a legal justification for his seizure of the Panama Canal, Knox’s ironic response was: “Oh, Mr President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”

I never imagined I would ever be engrossed in reading a 100-page legal document, as I was in reading High Court judge Azimah Omar’s judgment on former attorney-general Mohamed Apandi Ali’s (above) defamation suit against Iskandar Puteri MP Lim Kit Siang for having asked for an explanation on “why he aided and abetted in the 1MDB scandal”.

My fascination with the judgment was not in any new revelation about 1MDB, the cash cow that was milked for billions by various individuals. We have had a wealth of evidence of ill-gotten wealth from all over the globe, revealing a subterranean conduit of billions, millions, flowing here, surfacing there, at the source 1MDB.

What hooked me into reading the judgment was the learned judge’s language.

I have spent all my life immersed in words, from the magical wonder/mysteries of my first Beano and Dandy, and my first “story-book”, an Indian edition of a few Aesop’s Fables, a dirty grey cover with a small illustration of the sour grapes fox, bought for 50 cents from the Indian newsagent in the lane next to the Stylo barber shop in Brickfields, to an eventual Masters in English Literature, and my subsequent careers as writer, journalist, lecturer, book-shop owner.

My impression of legalese is that it is...