“You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth,” the playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote.

That principle, however, does not apply to crusading lawyers. A federal court in New York recently ruled that lawyer Todd Bank does not have a constitutional right to stand up in court dressed as if he were at a baseball game.

In 2008, Bank appeared in the civil court in Queens wearing blue jeans, an open-neck casual shirt and a baseball cap bearing the words “Operation Desert Storm”. Judge Anne Katz admonished him for his dress and the senior court clerk told him to remove his hat. Bank then sued them both, alleging he had a constitutional right to dress as he wished in court. He said it was a right of freedom of expression and of fundamental liberty.

Bank’s claim was heard by the United States District Court of Eastern New York. It ruled that the function of a courtroom is to provide a place where civil and criminal disputes can be adjudicated and that in this “staid environment” a judge must maintain proper decorum. Unless someone has a religious reason to have his head covered, it is “generally accepted etiquette to remove an everyday hat when entering a courtroom”. It is not someone’s right to express himself as he wishes in a courtroom because “a courtroom is not a public forum for the expression of ideas”.

Bank is well-known in New York legal circles as an advocate not only for his clients but also as someone who sues people personally. His back catalogue of cases includes Bank v Pentagon Financial Group (2009), Bank v US Healthcare (2001) and Bank v Brooklyn Law School (2000), where he sued an entire building of lawyers - rarely a good option.

In the recent case in Queens in which his clothes were criticised, Bank was suing personally but this did not affect the court’s right to require him to dress in a way that suited the dignity of the courtroom rather than “clothes that might have been worn to a baseball game”.

What to wear in court has always been of concern among lawyers. In ancient Rome, Quintilian recommended the precise way in which an advocate should wear his toga. “The left arm should only be raised so far as to form a right-angle at the elbow” he insisted “while the edge of the toga should fall in equal lengths on either side”.

In Britain, historically, it was once held to be a crime of fashion when a barrister appeared in court wearing a white waistcoat beneath his robe. In another case, the Attorney-General, Sir Richard Bethell, sent for a barrister and gave him a long withering lecture for having appeared in court in a waistcoat bearing golden buttons.

Mr Justice Byles, though, had some worrying impartiality issues – he once declared he listened “with little pleasure to the arguments of counsel whose legs are encased in light grey trousers”.

The book Weird Cases by Gary Slapper is published in December by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill.

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