Out of Court
AFTER giving judgment in the Restrictive Practices Court last week Mr. Justice Dip- lock referred to a comment in the Spectator during the hearings, in which we drew attention to one of the arguments put forward by the Cement Makers Federation. 'The comment,' Mr. Justice Diplock said, 'was a passing one in an article dealing with a different topic, and it did not appear to the court that any further action was, in all the circumstances, required'; but he delivered a warning that matters before his court• are sub fiance, and that publication of comment on a case during the hearing may be regarded as contempt and dealt with accordingly.
We do not dispute that the Restrictive Prac- tices Court has powers to deal with contempts; but we would suggest that they were intended for disciplinary purposes in a rather narrower field. Contempt powers may be necessary to ensure, say, that a court order is enforced, or to punish a bystander who throws rotten tomatoes at prosecuting counsel. But contempt proceedings taken to punish somebody who has published material which may prejudice an accused man's chance of a fair trial, by putting evidence before a jury that would not be admissible in their presence in court, are a different matter. In courts where there is no jury, judges arc perfectly capable of sifting whatever may be said or written outside and ignoring it if it is misleading or irrelevant.
In any case, as We pointed out at the time, the Cement Makers Federation was not on trial in the ordinary sense' of the term. If the Court's verdict had gone against it, its members would not have suffered the fate of the executives of the Trutt recently busted in the US, some of whom had to go to gaol: they would simply have had to change the Federation's rules in future. But in this case, the Court has ruled that the Federation's restrictive practices are not con- trary to the public interest; a decision which we welcome, as it was far from our intention, when making the comment that caused the fuss, to impugn the Federation or its policies—or to distract the Court in the course of its complex deliberations. Mr. Justice Diplock has temper- ately expressed what is now the orthodox view— from the Bench—of contempt : we can only repeat our belief that the net should not spread so far.
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