John Mortimer Legal career When did Mortimer start his legal career? Mortimer was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1948, at the age of 25. What firm did he work for? I don't know. What type of law did he practice? His early career consisted of testamentary and divorce work, Did that change later in his career? on taking silk in 1966, he began to undertake work in criminal law. What is "taking silk"? I don't know. Did he work on any major cases? Whitehouse v. Lemon When was this case? 1976, Did he win the case? Lemon was convicted with a suspended prison sentence, later overturned on appeal. What was the case about? he defended Gay News editor Denis Lemon (Whitehouse v. Lemon) for the publication of James Kirkup's "The Love that Dares to Speak its Name"
What other cases did he work on?
Other than the major case, What other cases did John Mortimer work on?
Mortimer was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1948, at the age of 25. His early career consisted of testamentary and divorce work, but on taking silk in 1966, he began to undertake work in criminal law. His highest profile, though, came from cases relating to claims of obscenity, which, according to Mortimer, were "alleged to be testing the frontiers of tolerance."  He has sometimes been incorrectly cited as a member in the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial defence team, though this is inaccurate. Mortimer did however successfully represent publishers John Calder and Marion Boyars in their 1968 appeal against their conviction for publishing Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn. He assumed a similar role three years later, this time unsuccessfully, for Richard Handyside, the English publisher of The Little Red Schoolbook.  Mortimer was also defence counsel at the Oz conspiracy trial later in 1971. In 1976, he defended Gay News editor Denis Lemon (Whitehouse v. Lemon) for the publication of James Kirkup's "The Love that Dares to Speak its Name" against charges of blasphemous libel; Lemon was convicted with a suspended prison sentence, later overturned on appeal. His defence of Virgin Records in the 1977 obscenity hearing for their use of the word bollocks in the title of the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and the manager of the Nottingham branch of the Virgin record shop chain for the record's display in a window and its sale, led to the defendants' being found not guilty. Mortimer retired from the bar in 1984. CANNOTANSWER
His defence of Virgin Records in the 1977 obscenity hearing for their use of the word bollocks
Sir John Clifford Mortimer  (21 April 1923 – 16 January 2009) was an English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author. He is best known for novels about a barrister named Horace Rumpole.

Early life
Mortimer was born in Hampstead, London, the only child of Kathleen May (née Smith) and (Herbert) Clifford Mortimer (1884–1961), a divorce and probate barrister who became blind in 1936 when he hit his head on the door frame of a London taxi but still pursued his career. Clifford's loss of sight was not acknowledged openly by the family.

John Mortimer was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and Harrow School, where he joined the Communist Party, forming a one-member cell. He first intended to be an actor (his lead role in the Dragon's 1937 production of Richard II gained glowing reviews in The Draconian) and then a writer, but his father persuaded him against it, advising: "My dear boy, have some consideration for your unfortunate wife... [the law] gets you out of the house."

At 17, Mortimer went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read law, though he was actually based at Christ Church because the Brasenose buildings had been requisitioned for the war effort. In July 1942, at the end of his second year, he was sent down from Oxford by John Lowe, Dean of Christ Church, after romantic letters to a Bradfield College sixth-former, Quentin Edwards, later a QC, were discovered by the young man's housemaster. But Mortimer was still allowed to take his Bachelor of Arts degree in law in October 1943. His close friend Michael Hamburger believed he had been very harshly treated.

Early writing career
With weak eyes and doubtful lungs, Mortimer was classified as medically unfit for military service in World War II. He worked for the Crown Film Unit under Laurie Lee, writing scripts for propaganda documentaries.

I lived in London and went on journeys in blacked-out trains to factories and coal-mines and military and air force installations. For the first and, in fact, the only time in my life I was, thanks to Laurie Lee, earning my living entirely as a writer. If I have knocked the documentary ideal, I would not wish to sound ungrateful to the Crown Film Unit. I was given great and welcome opportunities to write dialogue, construct scenes and try and turn ideas into some kind of visual drama.

He based his first novel, Charade, on his experiences with the Crown Film Unit.

Mortimer made his radio debut as a dramatist in 1955, adapting his own novel Like Men Betrayed for the BBC Light Programme. His debut as an original playwright came with The Dock Brief starring Michael Hordern as a hapless barrister, first broadcast in 1957 on BBC Radio's Third Programme, and later televised with the same cast. It later appeared in a double bill with What Shall We Tell Caroline? at the Lyric Hammersmith in April 1958, before transferring to the Garrick Theatre. The Dock Brief was revived by Christopher Morahan in 2007 for a touring double bill with Legal Fictions. It won the Prix Italia in 1957, and its success on radio, stage, and television led Mortimer to prefer writing for performance rather than writing novels.

Mortimer's play A Voyage Round My Father, first broadcast on radio in 1963, is autobiographical, recounting his experiences as a young barrister and his relations with his blind father. It was televised by BBC Television in 1969 with Mark Dignam in the title role. In a lengthier version, the play became a stage success – first at Greenwich Theatre with Dignam, then in 1971 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket with Alec Guinness). In 1981 it was remade by Thames Television with Laurence Olivier as the father and Alan Bates as young Mortimer. In 1965, he and his wife wrote the screenplay for the Otto Preminger film Bunny Lake is Missing, which also starred Olivier.

Legal career
Mortimer was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1948, at the age of 25. His early career covered testamentary and divorce work, but on taking silk in 1966, he began to undertake criminal law. His highest profile came from cases relating to claims of obscenity, which, according to Mortimer, were "alleged to be testing the frontiers of tolerance."

He has sometimes been cited wrongly as one in the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial defence team. He did, however, successfully defend publishers John Calder and Marion Boyars in an 1968 appeal against a conviction for publishing Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn. He assumed a similar role three years later, this time unsuccessfully, for Richard Handyside, the English publisher of The Little Red Schoolbook.

In 1971, Mortimer managed to defend the editors of the satirical paper Oz against a charge of "conspiracy to corrupt and debauch the morals of the young of the Realm", which might have carried a sentence of 12 years' hard labour. In 1976, he defended Gay News editor Denis Lemon (Whitehouse v. Lemon) against charges of blasphemous libel for publishing James Kirkup's The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name; Lemon was given a suspended prison sentence, which was overturned on appeal. He successfully defended Virgin Records in a 1977 obscenity hearing for using the word bollocks in the title of the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols and the manager of the Nottingham branch of Virgin record shop chain for displaying and selling the record. Mortimer retired from the bar in 1984.

Later writing career
Mortimer is best remembered for creating a barrister named Horace Rumpole, inspired by his father Clifford, whose speciality is defending those accused in London's Old Bailey. Mortimer created Rumpole for a BBC Play For Today in 1975. Although not Mortimer's first choice of actor – in an interview on the DVD set, he said he wanted Alistair Sim "but he turned out to be dead so he couldn't take it on" – Australian-born Leo McKern played Rumpole with gusto and proved popular. The idea was developed into a series, Rumpole of the Bailey, for Thames Television, in which McKern kept the lead role. Mortimer also wrote a series of Rumpole books. In September–October 2003, BBC Radio 4 broadcast four new 45-minute Rumpole plays by Mortimer with Timothy West in the title role. Mortimer also dramatised many real-life cases of the barrister Edward Marshall-Hall in a radio series with former Doctor Who star Tom Baker as protagonist.

In 1975 and 1976, Mortimer adapted eight of Graham Greene’s short stories for episodes of Shades of Greene presented by Thames Television. Mortimer was credited with writing the script for Granada Television's 1981 serialization of Brideshead Revisited, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. However, Graham Lord's unofficial biography, John Mortimer: The Devil's Advocate, revealed in 2005 that none of Mortimer's submitted scripts had in fact been used and the screenplay was actually written by the series' producer and director. Mortimer adapted John Fowles's The Ebony Tower starring Laurence Olivier for Granada in 1984. In 1986, his adaptation of his own novel Paradise Postponed was televised. He wrote the script, based on the autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli, for the 1999 film Tea with Mussolini, directed by Zeffirelli and starring Joan Plowright, Cher, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Lily Tomlin. From 2004, Mortimer worked as a consultant for the politico-legal US "dramedy" television show Boston Legal.

Mortimer developed his career as a dramatist by rising early to write before attending court. His work in total includes over 50 books, plays and scripts.  Besides 13 episodes of Rumpole dramatized for radio in 1980, several others of his works were broadcast on the BBC, including the true crime series John Mortimer Presents: The Trials Of Marshall Hall and Sensational British Trials.

Personal life
Mortimer in 1949 married Penelope Fletcher as her second husband, later better known as Penelope Mortimer. They had a son, Jeremy Mortimer, and a daughter, Sally Silverman. The unstable marriage inspired work by both writers, of which Penelope's novel, The Pumpkin Eater (1962), later made into a film of the same name, is best known. The couple divorced in 1971 and he married Penelope Gollop in 1972. They had two daughters, Emily Mortimer (1971), and Rosie Mortimer (1984). He and his second wife lived in the Buckinghamshire village of Turville Heath. The split with his first wife had been bitter, but they were on friendly terms by the time of her death in 1999.

In September 2004, the Sunday Telegraph journalist Tim Walker revealed that Mortimer had fathered another son,  Ross Bentley, who was conceived during a secret affair Mortimer had with the English actress Wendy Craig more than 40 years earlier. He was born in November 1961. Craig and Mortimer had met when the actress had been cast playing a pregnant woman in Mortimer's first full-length West End play, The Wrong Side of the Park. Ross Bentley was raised by Craig and her husband, Jack Bentley, the show business writer and musician.

In Mortimer's memoirs, Clinging to the Wreckage, he wrote of "enjoying my mid-thirties and all the pleasures which come to a young writer."

Honours
Awarded a CBE in 1986, he was knighted in 1998.

Death
Mortimer suffered a stroke in October 2008 and died on 16 January 2009, aged 85.

Attributes
John Mortimer was a member of English PEN.  He was patron of the Burma Campaign UK, the London-based group campaigning for human rights and democracy in Burma and president of the Royal Court Theatre, having been the chairman of its board in 1990–2000.

Bibliography

Charade, Mortimer's first novel, Bodley Head, London (1947); Viking, New York (1986); 
Rumming Park, Bodley Head, London (1948)
Answer Yes Or No, Bodley Head, London (1950)
Like Men Betrayed, Collins, London (1953); Viking, New York (1988); 
The Narrowing Stream, Collins, London (1954); Viking, New York (1989); 
Three Winters, Collins, London (1956)
Heaven and Hell (including The Fear of Heaven and The Prince of Darkness) (1976)
Will Shakespeare (1977)
Rumpole of the Bailey (1978); 
The Trials of Rumpole (1979)
Rumpole's Return (1980)
Regina v Rumpole (1981)
Rumpole for the Defence (1982)
Clinging to the Wreckage: A Part Of Life (autobiography) Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London (1982); ; Houghton Mifflin, New York (1982); 
The First Rumpole Omnibus (omnibus) (1983)
Rumpole and the Golden Thread (1983)
A Choice of Kings, in Alan Durband, ed., Playbill 3 (Nelson Thornes, 1966), 
Edwin and Other Plays (1984)
In Character (1984); 
Paradise Postponed (1985); 
Character Parts (1986); 
Rumpole for the Prosecution (1986)
Rumpole's Last Case (1987)
The Second Rumpole Omnibus (omnibus) (1987)
Rumpole and the Age of Miracles (1988)
Glasnost (BBC Radio Four, 1988)
Summer's Lease (1988); 
Rumpole and the Age for Retirement (1989)  - stand-alone publication of short story first published in The Trials of Rumpole (1979) 
Rumpole a La Carte (1990)
Titmuss Regained (1990)
Great Law And Order Stories (1990)
The Rapstone Chronicles (omnibus; 1991)
Rumpole On Trial (1992)
Dunster (1992); 
Thou Shalt Not Kill: Father Brown, Father Dowling And Other Ecclesiastical Sleuths (1992) (with G K Chesterton and Ralph McInerny)
The Oxford Book of Villains (1992)
The Best of Rumpole: A Personal Choice (1993)
Under the Hammer (1994)
Murderers and Other Friends: Another Part of Life (autobiography), Viking, London (1994); Viking, NY (1995); 
Rumpole and the Angel of Death (1995)
Rumpole and the Younger Generation (1995)  - stand-alone publication of short story first published in Rumpole of the Bailey (1978) 
Felix in the Underworld (1996)
The Third Rumpole Omnibus (omnibus) (1997)
The Sound of Trumpets (1998)
The Mammoth Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories (1998)
The Summer of a Dormouse: A Year of Growing Old Disgracefully (autobiography), Viking Penguin, London (2000); ; Viking Press, New York (2001); 
Rumpole Rests His Case (2002)
Rumpole and the Primrose Path (2002)
The Brancusi Trial (2003)
Where There's a Will (autobiography), Viking, London (2003) ; Viking, New York (2005); 
Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (2004); 
Quite Honestly (2005); 
The Scales of Justice (2005); 
Rumpole and the Reign of Terror (2006); 
The Antisocial Behaviour of Horace Rumpole (2007; in United States as Rumpole Misbehaves)
Rumpole at Christmas (2009)

Select screenwriting credits
The Innocents (additional dialogue, 1961)
Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
A Flea in Her Ear (1968)
John and Mary (1969)
 Edwin (1984, TV film)
Maschenka (1987) (Vladimir Nabokov novel adaptation directed by John Goldschmidt)
Tea With Mussolini (1999)

References

The Radio Companion by Paul Donovan, HarperCollins (1991) 
Halliwell's Television Companion, Third edition, Grafton (1986) 
Who's Who in the Theatre, 17th edition, ed Ian Herbert, Gale (1981) 
John Mortimer: The Devil's Advocate by Graham Lord, Orion (2005)

External links

John Mortimer plays in Bristol University Theatre Archive

John Mortimer biography
Finding Aid to the John Clifford Mortimer papers at The Bancroft Library
Inventory to the John Clifford Mortimer papers at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

Recordings and Photos of the visit by Sir John to the College Historical Society in October 2007

Obituary: Sir John Mortimer (BBC)
Sir John Clifford Mortimer (1923-2009), barrister, playwright and writer Sitter in 7 portraits (National Portrait Gallery)

1923 births
2009 deaths
Alumni of Brasenose College, Oxford
British Book Award winners
Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
English barristers
English dramatists and playwrights
English short story writers
English television writers
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Knights Bachelor
People educated at Gibbs School
People educated at The Dragon School
People educated at Harrow School
People from Hampstead
People from Wycombe District
Prix Italia winners
Booker authors' division
English male dramatists and playwrights
English male short story writers
English male novelists
20th-century English novelists
20th-century British short story writers
20th-century English male writers
British male television writers
John
20th-century English screenwriters
20th-century English lawyers
Members of the Inner Temple
Queen's Counsel 1901–2000
Ellis v. United States, 206 U.S. 246 (1907), is a court case that was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The case, which was identified as case No. 567, was argued in conjunction with three cases entitled Eastern Dredging Company v. United States (Nos. 664, 665, and 666) and three cases entitled Bay State Dredging Company v. United States (Nos. 667, 668, and 669).

All seven cases concerned the issue of whether the federal government had the power to limit the number of hours worked per day by federal workers or employees of federal contractors. In its judgment, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law limiting the hours worked by such persons.

The cases were originally addressed by the District Court of the United States for the District of Massachusetts. They were argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on April 23 and 24, 1907, and decided on May 13, 1907.

D. T. Watson argued for the plaintiff in No. 567; Edward E. Blodgett and G. Philip Wardner argued for the plaintiff in Nos. 664, 665, 666; W. Orison Underwood, Henry F. Knight, and Johnson, Clapp, & Underwood argued for the plaintiff in Nos. 667, 668, 669. Solicitor General Hoyt, Attorney General Bonaparte, and Mr. Otis J. Carlton argued for the defendant.

Background
The plaintiffs had been found guilty under the Act of August 1, 1892, c. 352, 27 Stat. 340, “Relating to the Limitation of the Hours of Daily Service of Laborers and Mechanics Employed upon the Public Works of the United States and of the District of Columbia.”

In Ellis's case, No. 567, the plaintiff had agreed to construct a pier at the Boston Navy Yard within six months. When work fell behind he had his men work for nine hours a day instead of eight.

The Eastern Dredging Company was hired to dredge a portion of the channel in Boston Harbor, and the Bay State Dredging Company was engaged to dredge Chelsea Creek in Boston Harbor. The three Eastern Dredging cases were as follows: No. 664 involved the employment of two deck hands and an assistant craneman and deck hand; No. 665, the employment of a master, craneman, and fireman; and No. 666, the employment of the captain, mate, engineer, and foreman of a tug and a man in charge of a scow. Of the Bay State Dredging cases, No. 667 involved the employment of a captain, mate, and fireman; No. 668, the employment of a craneman and deck hand; and No. 669, the employment of a scowman and the captain and engineer of a tug.

The plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of the act under which they had been found guilty, which limited all laborers and mechanics employed by the United States, by the District of Columbia, or by their public-works contractors or subcontractors, to eight hours a day except in emergency situations. The two dredging firms also challenged the applicability of the law to the activity of dredging, as opposed to building.

Court's opinion
Justice Holmes found that while the contention of unconstitutionality was not frivolous, the act was justified. Citing Atkin v. Kansas, 191 U.S. 207, which upheld the right of a state to pass similar laws, he wrote: “We see no reason to deny to the United States the power thus established for the States.” Another contention of the plaintiffs was that “the Government waived its sovereignty by making a contract, and that even if the Act of 1892 were read into the contract, a breach of its requirements would be only a breach of contract and could not be made a crime.” Holmes called this contention “a mere confusion of ideas,” explaining that “The Government purely as contractor, in the absence of special laws, may stand like a private person, but by making a contract it does not give up its power to make a law.”

Holmes did, however, accept the claim by the two dredging companies that some of the men employed by them did not strictly qualify as “laborers and mechanics” and “were not employed upon any of the public works of the United States within the meaning of the act.” In other words, he accepted that the distinction between employing construction workers to build a pier on land and employing seamen to dredge a channel in a waterway was significant enough that the former activity fell within the purview of the act while the latter activity did not. He therefore affirmed the judgment in the case against Ellis while reversing the judgments in 664 through 669.

Justice Moody took no part in the decision on the Ellis case, and dissented on 664 through 669, a dissent in which he was joined by Justices Harlan and Day.

Justice McKenna felt that the work in Chelsea Creek fell within the scope of the act, but otherwise agreed with the court's judgment.

Justice Moody's dissent
Justice Moody argued that the dredging of channels did indeed fall within the scope of the act. He argued that the channels were indeed “public works,” and that it was unreasonable to think that the legislators who had written the act in question had intended that men who work on a pier “should work only eight hours a day, while those who work nearby on the channel itself should be exempted from this restriction.” 

He acknowledged that seamen were “not laborers or mechanics” and, when working at sea, could not practicably “be brought within the limits of an eight-hour day,” but he added that when a seaman is hired to do other work, such as dredging along the coast, he is not working as a seaman but can in fact be described as a “laborer or mechanic.”  Justice Moody did not find it meaningful for the purposes of the case that “the scows and dredges were vessels, or those employed upon them for some purposes are deemed seamen”; rather, what mattered was what kind of work the men were engaged in while employed by the appellants.

References

External links
 

United States Supreme Court cases
United States Supreme Court cases of the Fuller Court
1907 in United States case law
Labor rights John Rollo M.D. (d. December 23, 1809) was a Scottish military surgeon, now known for his work on a diabetic diet. Rollo was the first to suggest a low-carbohydrate diet as a treatment for diabetes.

Life
He was born in Scotland, and received his medical education at Edinburgh. He became a surgeon in the Royal Artillery in 1776, and then served in the West Indies. In 1778 the University of St Andrews made him M.D. He was stationed in St. Lucia in 1778–9 and in Barbados in 1781. His associates included Colin Chisholm on Grenada.

Rollo became surgeon-general of the Royal Artillery in 1794, and returned to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. There he oversaw the construction of the enlarged Royal Artillery Hospital: the Royal Ordnance Hospital dated from about 1780, and the enlargement was completed in 1806 (the building later became the Connaught Barracks). From 1804 he was inspector of hospitals for the Ordnance.

Rollo was frequently consulted about cases of diabetes, and in treatment had some success with the use of a nitrogenous diet. He died at Woolwich on 23 December 1809, and was buried at Plumstead.

Diabetes

In 1797 Rollo printed at Deptford Notes of a Diabetic Case, which described the improvement of an officer with diabetes who was placed on a meat diet. He was the first to take Matthew Dobson's discovery of glycosuria in diabetes mellitus and apply it to managing metabolism. By means of Dobson's testing procedure (for glucose in the urine) Rollo worked out a diet that had success for what is now called type 2 diabetes. The addition of the term "mellitus", distinguishing the condition from diabetes insipidus, has been attributed to Rollo.

Rollo's diet for diabetic patients consisted of "milk, lime water, bread and butter, blood pudding, meat, and rancid fat". He has been described as "the first one to recommend a diet low in carbohydrates as a treatment for diabetes."

Rollo collaborated with William Cruickshank, who was the chemistry assistant at Woolwich. In another edition of the work, An Account of Two Cases of the Diabetes Mellitus, published in 1798, other cases were added, and some of Cruikshank's research on urine and sugar in diabetics was included. A further edition appeared in 1806. John Latham supported Rollo's views on the treatment. In 1824 the Encyclopædia Britannica in its article "Dietetics" commented that the diet was successful in repressing the condition of the patients' urine, but that the patients often found the high fat content intolerable. This kind of dietary management continued to the 1920s, being more successful for adults, who might survive some years, than for young patients who typically had only some months of life on it. Other collaborations of Rollo and Cruikshank related to treatments for syphilis involving acids, and published with the work on diabetes; proteinuria; and strontium.

Other work

Rollo published Observations on the Diseases in the Army on St. Lucia, in 1781; and in 1785 Remarks on the Disease lately described by Dr. Hendy, on a form of elephantiasis known as "Barbados leg". In 1786 he published Observations on the Acute Dysentery.

Rollo published in 1801 a Short Account of the Royal Artillery Hospital at Woolwich. He had kept a record of his cases in Barbados, and the Account included a similar table for the Ordnance hospital. In 1804 a Medical Report on Cases of Inoculation supported the views of Edward Jenner.

References

Further reading

Alexander Marble. (1989. John Rollo. In: von Engelhardt D. (eds) Diabetes Its Medical and Cultural History. Springer. pp. 229–234.

Attribution

Year of birth missing
1809 deaths
Alumni of the University of St Andrews
Low-carbohydrate diet advocates
Scottish surgeons