Legal case casesby a title of the form "Claimant v Defendant" (e.g. "Arkell v Pressdram"). Where a legal proceeding does not have formally designated adverse parties, a form such as "In re", "Re" or "In the matter of" is used (e.g. "In re Gault"). The "v" separating the parties is an abbreviation of the Latin versus, but, when spoken in Commonwealth countries, it is normally rendered as "and" or "against" (as in, for example, Charles Dickens' "Jarndyce and Jarndyce"). Where it is considered necessary to protect the anonymity of a natural person, some cases may have one or both parties replaced by
Bleak House taken a shot at law-courts and that side of the legal profession in his 1837 novel "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" or "The Pickwick Papers"). Scholars – such as the English legal historian Sir William Searle Holdsworth, in his 1928 series of lectures "Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian" published by Yale University Press – have made a plausible case for treating Dickens's novels, and "Bleak House" in particular, as primary sources illuminating the history of English law. Dickens claimed in the preface to the book edition of "Bleak House" that he had "purposely dwelt upon the romantic