TWTWTW 30 Jan-03 Feb 2023
Your Exam Starts Now
Sometimes life presents those that teach with a real live case, that would make a perfect exam question, if only you had thought of it first. Once it has happened, all you can do, and I speak here from experience, as one that teaches, is file it away in the hope that eventually all will be forgotten, and you can wheel it out, looking creative, on the grounds that it could not possibly have happened in real life and that is question is nothing more than the workings of a sleep deprived and desperate mind…
For those lucky enough not to have studied law, you will not be aware of the style of question the subject Conflict of Laws presents to students. This is the study of what to do when there are arguably two different legal systems that may have a claim to decide the issue. Questions usually start: A has a book. B steals it, rents it to C, who gave it to her boyfriend D. D and E marry and move to Latin America. On their divorce, G, the illegitimate child of D and F donates the book… Generally – spoiler alert – the correct answer is that if there is any legal remainder in the book, the law regards the book as never having existed, but I digress.
Nevertheless, have sympathy, real sympathy, for aviation law lecturers whose excitement must have been tingled with real heartbreak when they read on Friday of what happened in Tel Aviv as a Ryanair flight was boarded. Faced with having to pay a fee for bring an infant on-board, or argue about that and thus miss the flight, they simply left the child behind. Simple. No Conflict of Law professor, no Air Law professor would, in their wildest dreams have come up with this scenario.
There is another argument to be had, and it seems that President Biden – one of the few people to take on Michael O’Leary and Ryanair’s charging process – wants to argue about what he calls ‘junk fees’. He is mooting a junk fee prevention act, and more power to his elbow. Why a child that is to held on its parents’ laps incurs a charge is one for whoever it is that tries to claim that the fee for checking in luggage has anything, anything, to do with the actual cost, despite airlines trying to fob it off as ‘users pay’. It if was, please explain why the cost would double when the bag is presented at check-in and not foreshadowed months in advance.
The good news, if you are the child, I guess, is that the child was reunited with its parents. The rating of that news on the great to awful spectrum for the parents is harder to gauge. But for the professors of Conflicts, and of Air Law, it is great news, because we do not know the real answer to strictly legal questions. They are free to set it, and to watch the chaos. Not even the law – a low bar, admittedly – would regard the child as never having existed.