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There is a legal principle known as de minimis non curat lex – the law takes no account of trifling matters. It means, for example, that there should not be a prosecution for the theft of a penny nor litigation over a freight train full of fruit that arrives one apple short.

This principle may have been missing from the training of the wheel-clamper who recently secured Ian Taylor’s Ford Fiesta. The car had the necessary certificate for vehicles kept off the road (for instance on private property) but was not taxed to be on the road. At the moment the car was clamped, although almost the entire vehicle was off the road and on Mr Taylor’s front drive, two inches were protruding towards the road.

Since he bought the broken car for £50 to repair as a gift for his stepson, Mr Taylor, from Tredworth in Gloucestershire, was upset to discover that he would have to pay the clampers £280 to secure its release.

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Instead, he took a large metal cutting machine - and the law - into his own hands. Enraged, Mr Taylor chopped the car in half and - with a thought as nimble as his handiwork - told the clampers to take the back half of the car, since it was that part which was fractionally overhanging the road. Moments later five police cars and ten officers were on the scene. In legal terms, things had escalated from de minimis to de maximis but common sense eventually prevailed and no prosecutions followed.

Applications of the principle of de minimis have varied and sometimes what seem like minimal matters do reach court. In 1983, a Kent couple removed a defective fence post on their land. After repairing the post, they replaced it two inches nearer their neighbour’s land. The two-inch dispute turned into a two-year stretch of litigation and the eventual court judgment was so convoluted it took two hours to read.

In another similar case, it was not the position of the fence post that was in issue but the width of string around it. The string was alleged to be a trespass on the adjoining land. It kept lawyers busy for a while but the de minimis rule was applied and the incident was not judged as a trespass.

In 1992, in Alberta, Canada, Judge C.L Daniel acquitted Marion Harrison of assault when it became apparent that the charge related to an incident in which she had allegedly hit her ex-husband with a shopping bag filled with clothes. But in 2007, in Dubai, a British citizen, Keith Brown, was sentenced to four years imprisonment for possession of 0.003 grams of cannabis - about the weight of a grain of sand.

One person who could not rely on the de minimis rule was Dietmar Hehenberger, an Austrian hotelier. In 2006, following a court order, Mr Hehenberger sawed off part of his hotel roof because it was hanging over the Austrian border into the Czech Republic. The overhang was 12 inches - a definite inconvenience if it is the length of your bed at stake but much but less of an incursion into the Czech Republic, that extends over 30,450 square miles.

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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