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"This lawyer is useless," thought Wang Jianbang. "I'm sure I could do better than that."

He had been involved in an exasperating two-year litigation struggle and his lawyer had just screwed things up by confusing a civil case with an administrative one. Mr Wang, of Zhengzhou City, China, then resolved to study law so he applied to the Zhengzhou Justice School. He was duly admitted, although given a remission of his fees on account of his age. It wasn’t, though, that he was still in high school, it was because he is 88.

Others are also challenging conventional thinking about age and the law. While Mr Wang is sagely poring over his law books in China, Joao Victor Portellinha, from Goias state Brazil, is also preparing to reject age prejudice and the law. He has just passed his entrance examination to law school. “My dream is to be a federal judge," he said recently, "So I decided to take the test to see how I would do . . . it was easy. I studied a week before the test." Brazilian lawyers, though, are very uneasy about this success. They’d be happy if Mr Portellinha was 88. In fact he’s only eight.

The world's weirdest cases

From the man who sued God to the man who sued TV for making his wife fat, people turn to lawyers for the strangest things

Some English lawyers have achieved things at extraordinary ages. In 1760 Jeremy Bentham, the jurist, went up to Oxford aged 12, and the law lord, Lord Bridge of Harwich, gained his degree in mathematics from the Open University in 2003 when aged 87.

But law courts haven’t always been proficient at quickly telling people’s ages. In Lord v Thornton, a case in Yorkshire in 1616, an advocate argued heroically throughout the case that his client, the defendant, was an infant. There was some disagreement about this in court. When, ultimately, a church records book was consulted to resolve the matter, it turned out that the defendant was not an infant. He was 63. Never think that some cases are too difficult for a lawyer to argue.

Professor Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. His recent book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

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