A Seventh Child and The Law

Patrick Shuk-siu Yu

jun 1998 · Hong Kong University Press

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The author comes from a distinguished family in Hong Kong. His father, Yu Wan, was an eminent figure in educational circles both before and after the Second World War. In Part I of this book, there is a detailed description of the unique circumstances under which the author, as a matriculation student, was awarded a government scholarship to enter the University of Hong Kong in 1938. Altogether unpredictably this started a chain of events which landed him in two wartime jobs in China: with British Naval Intelligence and the Chinese Nationalist Army respectively. After the war, he won a Victory Scholarship to further his education at Oxford and finally qualify as a barrister-at-law. He attributes his good fortune to being the seventh child of his father who was himself a seventh child. Hence the title of this book. Part II of this work consists of an accurate separate account of eight actual court cases handled by the author as Defence Counsel. These specially chosen and cleverly captioned cases all make fascinating reading, because each of them carries a distinct flavour of its own ranging from murder trials with an unexpected turn of events and a variety of fraud cases to an intriguing account of an attempt to set up an innocent traffic policeman which was only barely frustrated. The manner in which the defence in each case was conducted is of particular interest.