THE arrest of five people for organising a striptease at a recent funeral in eastern China marks a change in law enforcement. Strippers, engaged to increase funeral attendances, had been common in some areas of China. The attitude of English law to the striptease has also shifted over time, with restrictions being slowly loosened, undone and eventually removed.

In 1961, however, Geoffrey Quinn (known as Paul Raymond) was prosecuted for keeping a disorderly house, the Raymond Revuebar, in Soho, London. A key question at the trial was whether a striptease act was such as to outrage public decency. Counsel for Mr Quinn strove hard to prevent the court from condemning the act. He invited the chairman of the bench to see the show. The invitation was declined. Counsel then offered to bring the show to court but the presence of a band blasting out The Stripper was ruled to be inappropriate. Finally, counsel offered to show, in a room above the court, a film of three strippers doing their act. The film was ruled to be inadmissible. It would not necessarily exhibit precisely the same performance as the act that attracted the prosecution. In judgment of the erotic, exactitude is essential. As Mr Justice Paull confidently assured the court, “in an act of this sort, the slightest alteration might make all the difference between suggestiveness or not”.

THE legal formula de minimis non curat lex means that the law does not concern itself with the smallest issues. The principle, though, does not apply in every situation. Complying with a court order, Dietmar Hehenberger, an Austrian hotelier, recently sawed off part of his hotel roof because it was hanging into the Czech Republic. The overhang was 12in and it mattered not that the Czech Republic extends over 30,450 square miles. English law has also sometimes shown a considerable care for what could be seen as de minimis. In 1983, a couple from Kent moved a fence post, after its repair, two inches nearer their neighbours’ land. The consequential litigation lasted more than two years, and the judgment took two hours to read. In another similar case, it was not the position of the fence post that was in issue but the width of string around it. The string was alleged to be a trespass on the adjoining land. This was a case which, as the knotted arguments unravelled, might well have induced the judge to daydream about another post.

THE website judiciary.gov.uk now carries the helpful calendar The Legal Year. It is subtitled Find out when judges are sitting during the year. Such openness has not always been the way. As Cicero explained to a court in November 63BC, at one time legal business could be transacted only on certain days of the year, and just a few privileged people such as priests and lawyers knew when they were. This gave lawyers great power and they were, Cicero notes, consulted as if they were astrologers. Then, in 4BC, Gnaeus Flavius changed everything. By learning the court dates he was able to “supply the people with a calendar and thus to rob the lawyers of their knowledge”. This did not entirely democratise the law, though, as lawyers began to develop esoteric formulas required for court proceedings. Cicero recorded his puzzlement that “so many of the finest legal brains should not yet have managed . . . to make up their minds as to whether one ought to say ‘two days from now’ or the ‘day after tomorrow’ ”. Resolution of that issue, however, must still be postponed, sine die.

The author is Professor of Law, and Director of the Centre for Law, at the Open University

gary.slapper@thetimes.co.uk