Lawyers at a council which is facing the prospect of suing itself are in for some late masochistic nights.

Carmarthenshire council in Wales has just rejected planning permission for a playing field at a local school. The trouble is that the planning permission was being sought retrospectively because the playing field has, in fact, already been built without permission. The new field stands 1.4 metres above the surrounding ground and is built on the rubble of a demolished school building. There were 19 formal objectors – the field now overlooks their houses - but their opinions were never taken into account as the law requires.

In this type of situation the council should take legal action against whoever built something unlawfully. But as the council owns the school and built the field, and then applied for "permission" afterwards, the council is now obliged to take legal proceedings against itself. In-house council lawyers are now working in a house divided. They should, though, buy some champagne for the end of the dispute because whichever way the case goes, some of the council lawyers will win.

Suing yourself isn’t unprecedented. In 2005, the head of the Lebanese General Security Directorate issued proceedings against himself in order to try to clear himself of negligence in relation to the murder of a former Prime Minister. Judges have even convicted themselves. William Ettrick, presiding in Sunderland, England, in the early 1800s once fined a farmer for taking a cart to market without his name on it. When the farmer protested that the judge’s own dung cart was outside the court without a name on it, the judge made a monosyllabic response (perhaps a sotto voce reference to the contents of his cart) and then imposed the same fine on himself.

Getting planning permission for something already built is among awkward cases where an impending decision has to look consistent with a past event. In a 19th century case from a remote town in the American west, a jury was out for 33 hours in a murder trial before returning a verdict of “not guilty”. The defendant, though, wasn’t in court to hear the verdict. The judge was unhappy and sent the jurors away again to reconsider their verdict. He urged them to come to a decision “more consistent with the facts”. The jury retired again and after a while came back with a “guilty” verdict. This time the judge said he was satisfied with the decision and then noted for the record that the defendant had already been hanged.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University. English Law, by Slapper & Kelly, is published by Routledge-Cavendish

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