William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll

In 1963, a young white landed American man beat a 52-year old black worker to death. His name was William Zantzinger and her name was Hattie Carroll. This is the song Bob Dylan wrote about them.

The court hearing the case of this killing handed down a six-month sentence, basically letting Zantzinger off the hook for the murder of Hattie Carroll.

How can law be so stupid?

It's built into the system: Legal reasoning involves more-or-less strictly applying rules and principles and this may result in unfair outcomes. Legal writing also has a way of erasing the important facts from consideration and sometimes from history, so that even the lawyers involved can forget. And of course, lawyers and courts are very expensive to use, so sometimes only one side gets an opportunity to answer the questions.

Blogging as a solution?

This is why you need songs. Or movies. Or poems. Or badly-written-blogs written by dead-on-their feet lawyers. Thanks to Bob Dylan's song (and no thanks to the legal system) William Zantzinger could hardly show his face in public until his death in 2009.

Because we cannot sing, we will blog.

Also, given that blogging has been around for many years and people are moving on to new methods of content-sharing, now is naturally the perfect time for labour lawyers to sign on. We are, after all, the people who started trying to regulate labour broking about 20 years after the practice set in.

Putting the labour back in labour law

We will tell you what the crazy laws say in short sentences.

We will decipher and simplify long and boring court judgments.

We will tell you what actually happens in court and at the CCMA.

We will hear from workers. Real workers. In real cases.

And we will probably crack some jokes and play some more songs.