Law: On the Town in London

A garden party hosted by the Queen was laid on at Buckingham Palace. During opening ceremonies at Westminster Hall, Her Majesty's Scots Guards bandsmen drew in their breath and tootled out Chattanooga Choo Choo. Barristers at the Old Bailey blinked uncertainly at that strange foreign phrase, "Have a nice day." And London's Daily Mail marked the occasion by proclaiming, "The loudly checked leisure suit and dime-store cigar make a welcome return to the city." Ten thousand American lawyers, and nearly as many spouses, children and friends, were on the town in London, assembled in tax-deductible (maybe) pomp and plenitude for the 107th meeting of the American Bar Association.

Jamming the Savoy, the Ritz and 125 other London hotels, the crush of counselors all but took over the city. The sober Times pronounced it the largest group of one nationality ever "to attend an event, other than war, in another country." Londoners and regular tourists had to wait in line as lawyers festooned in white name tags filled restaurants, pubs and tour sites that A.B.A. members had booked long in advance. Popular West End productions such as Cats and Starlight Express were sold out, and reservations soared at Raymond's Revue Bar, a burlesque house whose newspaper ads promised A.B.A. lawyers "the greatest erotic entertainment in London." Tourism officials estimated that the visiting attorneys would spend $40 million on their six-day visit.

There was, take your seats please, actual convention business as well, and the hottest topic of the general sessions was international terrorism. In her keynote address at Royal Albert Hall, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher spoke angrily of a newly "fashionable heresy," that "if you feel sufficiently strongly about some particular issue, be it nuclear weapons, racial discrimination or animal liberation, you are entitled to claim superiority to the law and are therefore absolved." Thatcher argued that terrorists were increasingly active, in part, because news attention encouraged them. The P.M. told the lawyers, to repeated applause, that reporters should voluntarily refrain from coverage that could boost terrorists' morale. In an obvious reference to last month's televised news conferences and interviews with American hostages in Beirut, Thatcher observed, "We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend."