YOU could say that the failure of the jury at Woolwich Crown Court to find a gang of bragging anti-western jihadists guilty of plotting to blast passenger aircraft out of the sky represented a triumph for a legal system which examines all evidence with dispassion and integrity.

At the same time you might stifle your exasperation that another jury should seriously consider global warming as legitimate mitigation for sparing a group of self-styled eco-warriors who’d engaged in a £35,000 wrecking spree at the site for a new coal-fired power station.

There’s no question that every man – or woman – should have the right to be considered innocent until proved otherwise. It is the expectation that every citizen will be dealt with fairly by all instruments of the legal code.

Sadly, like the political arena, the theatre of the courtroom has gained a reputation for adversarial nicety where legalistic punctiliousness overwhelms the wavering scales of natural justice. Indeed, the reputation of the legal profession which underpins the pillars of the nation’s establishment has suffered a severe caning.

It may be the innocent victim of its own inaccessibility and pomp, but the popular press appears able to treat us to a gleeful daily diet of evidence of inconsistency in judgments handed down, poking fun at ‘out of touch’ judges and feigning outrage against decisions which, on the face of it, seem to favour the miscreant against both victim and law-abiding society.

Their plaint – echoed, I would guess, by the majority of upright citizens – is: ‘We want justice, not the law’, or in other words, consistency and fair play. So, ‘the law is an ass’. Well, of course it’s not, and for all the shortcomings, it can resolutely withstand the summary judgments of the ‘red-top’ arbiters who aren’t averse to conducting their own virtual trials by innuendo and prejudice where cheque-book evidence has been gathered by the dustbin full.

Any layman of sound mind would concur that the rule of law is absolute. Enshrined by popular acclaim, it cannot be allowed to waver to suit popular trend or fashion. The trouble is, after precedent, technicalities are the things which underpin the law. You could argue that its diligence has become too complicated and, therefore, prey to subterfuge and mischief.

Barristers quite legitimately hoover up huge fees for trying every which way to prevent their clients incurring judicial penalty. The brightest spark in this tawdry street brazier is ‘Mr Loophole’ whose mink-lined reputation is based on running rings around the legal system to spring ‘celebs’ from driving offences using every obscure technicality to unpick honest attempts to bring perpetrators to book. This isn’t justice; this is theatre – of the absurd!

Conversely, the legal system provides a trap for those with only medium resources, unable to sustain costly litigation to pursue justice on grounds of expense, while for the bewigged protagonists, there are so many business opportunities being thrown up.

The activities of matrimonial counsel are legendary in the quest to massage a nondescript mole-hill dispute into a lucrative mountain, to say nothing of profiting from the spiralling cost of legal aid which has become a veritable goldmine of procrastination and pursuit of no-hope cases which pay out handsomely whatever the verdict.

When, for example, a 30-stone thug serving time for beating a victim to death is able to sue prison authorities for damaging his human rights because he lost weight in prison, you have to ask: who put him up to it? Who stands to benefit from such an outrageously offensive suit?

Legal language is so highly specialised that very few ‘ordinary’ folk can find their way through the maze. And politicians are quick to pounce on the possibilities offered by pseudo-legalistic terminology or subterfuge to slide out of falsehoods or responsibilities. Whenever one hears the phrase ‘So-and-so “denies any wrong doing”,’ you can be pretty-well assured that’s exactly what they have been doing; it is the legalistic version of: ‘I’m denying it until you’ve found me out’. We’re now faced with the interpretation game. Conduct is now judged not by what you should have done, but what you can get away with – abiding by the letter of the law rather than the spirit.

Which leads to the brazen manipulation of legal interpretation by those in authority. The UK government felt that it could ignore the recommendations of an independent review (which, incidentally, it set up) on pay for police officers in England and withhold part of the settlement, confident in the knowledge that the officers are forbidden by law to take industrial action. Despite universal criticism, when challenged in court, it was found not to have acted illegally, though morally it lost hands down as co-incidentally, MPs voted themselves an unchallenged pay rise.

The law has created a playground – or bear-pit – however you wish to describe it. Every terrorist, liar and sponger now apparently has the right to attempt to circumvent justice by citing their ‘human rights’. It’s enough to give any anti-litigious Meldrew a seizure. Currently, London’s Metropolitan Police is being assailed from within by spurious claims of discrimination by individuals confident that cash-strapped or weary public bodies will cave in to avoid a public-funded litigation-frenzy and spread-shot mischievous exposure.

It’s a sad day when plaintiffs opt to settle out of court, that is, by-pass the legal process, not because common sense has broken out rendering litigation unnecessary, but because they fear the legal process will be too painful, intrusive, complicated and costly. King Solomon might have cracked it, but in today’s litigious world, you could be forgiven for questioning whether the scales are balancing justice or compounding a felony.