Imagine you're in a room filled with people dressed variously in tracksuit bottoms and trainers, white bands with horse-hair wigs, uniforms, lounge suits, long black robes: you're either at a fancy-dress party or in a law court.

The question of how to dress in court is a difficult one for some litigants, defendants and witnesses. Recently at Mold Crown Court in north Wales, a judge rebuked a police officer for wearing full uniform in court. The officer – sporting armour with baton, handcuffs and pepper spray – was told by Judge John Rogers, "You don't come to court dressed like that." Last week in Derbyshire, Wayne Fontana, a former member of the 1960s group The Mindbenders, twisted the head of the court by arriving to face a serious charge dressed as the Roman goddess Justitia, the Lady of Justice. Judge Andrew Hamilton said: "I hope they give him a prison uniform at Nottingham Prison to keep him warm."

Judicial responses to irregular dress in court have varied. In 2002, Terence Lynch, a Rastafarian, was arrested from a gallery in Birmingham Crown Court and held in the cells for refusing to remove his tam hat. Later, the judge stated that he did not mean to disparage Rastafarianism and regretted any such interpretation of his action. Mr Lynch said: “I know he wouldn’t ask a Sikh to take off his turban”.

That was not the first courtroom hat spat. In 1670, when the Crown was trying to extinguish nonconformist religious worship, two Quakers - Willam Penn, 25, and William Mead, 42 - were prosecuted for “addressing a tumultuous assembly” in Gracechurch Street in London. Many Quakers opposed the convention of taking off their hats in the presence of social superiors. The judges were determined to get the defendants on that issue as well as on the criminal charge. So, although a court bailiff removed their hats before they entered the court, the judges ordered the hats to be replaced on the heads of Penn and Mead, then fined them 40 marks for refusing to take them off.

Hats off, though, to Edward Bushel, the jury foreman in the case who, along with other jurors, refused to convict Penn and Mead for the unknown crime of addressing a tumultuous assembly. Bushel’s case eventually established the important right of juries to give their own free verdicts as opposed to the ones judges demanded.

In 2003, at a criminal trial, Judge Huw Daniel dismissed a juror wearing a “fcuk” T-shirt. The judge said: “The misspelling of a basic Anglo-Saxon word on a garment hardly dignifies the court proceedings. It is beyond me why anyone can think they should wear anything like that in public, particularly in court."

Judges’ and barristers’ wigs today are in the style of the early 18th-century. At that time they signified wealth and status, and were adopted by advocates in that setting. Initially, judges thought the wigs were “coxcombical” (showy) and so didn’t allow young advocates to plead in them. But the wigs gradually became more accepted and stuck as a mode of court dress. The design of the barrister’s gown derives from the style of mourning gown adopted by the Bar following the death of Charles II in 1685.

Even in modern times, real and dramatised cases of dress code violation have resulted in trouble for some advocates. In the American film My Cousin Vinny, a newly qualified attorney, Vincent Gambini, the wonderful Joe Pesci, is standing in court in an open neck black shirt and a black leather jacket when he is asked by the outraged judge what he is wearing. Gambini’s answer is brief and genuinely puzzled: “Clothes, Your Honour,” he says. “I am wearing clothes”.

The English Bar has, historically, been meticulous in controlling the appearance of its members. In the 16th-century the Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn banned barristers from having beards. Courts have also been strict. In one case a magistrates’ court declined to hear an advocate who was wearing brown suede shoes. It condemned the footwear as better suited to the golf course than a law court. That, though, was before current human rights law applied, and it is doubtful that today an advocate’s slightly unorthodox shoes would be a trial stopper.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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