Letter: 'Professor' Lewis got it wrong

Local convention is at Christmastime hunters come out openly because the law then permits and that hunters beat around the bush before cutting to the chase. 

Professor Theodore Lewis foraged through 758 words before uttering the 95-word point he really wanted to make: that it's alright for His Excellency, The President, to take advice from the Opposition Leader on matters of Cabinet. 

Maybe Lewis was named after Theodore Roosevelt? Whatever! I'm calling him out because I detest persons tearing out of doors to tell us what we must think, without providing good evidence why we must heed.

In his amazing commentary (published in today's Express: “Charting the path to truth”), Theodore Lewis insists His Excellency, the President, has excellent cause (and solid legal underpinning) to haul the Honourable Prime Minister to court for "refusing to comply with the President's request" - an offence, lately invented. However, he ignored cogent countervailing arguments he himself simultaneously professed.

Going through the Professor's blurb, one clearly sees he's muddled over whether common law takes precedence over statute law and whether convention drives any or both. 

The mix-up misleads him to contend what obtains in England must obtain here, haplessly overlooking that, since 1976, we've done away with England, except in the case of finally settling certain court matters.

Convention makes law, or breaks law, since "convention" is "a pattern of behaviour established by practicability" and laws are born and followed of need. 

Thus, "need" is merely an emphatic way of saying "present convention requires" and "need", as we've seen, has led to persons quietly withdrawing their money before roofs caved-in on colonial institutions and to lavish expenditure on nappy memorials to the south of "The Savannah", while leaving Theodore Lewis's proposed plaintiff's roof to cave in on the north-side.

The Constitution is supreme. 

Conventional knowledge of English leads me to believe it is. So, when the Constitution says (as Professor Lewis reminded) the President can be removed from office before time, it's untenable for the professor to assert that, "at all costs, the Prime Minister and her government should seek to be on good terms with the President” …except the professor's eloquent fishing expedition was intended to advance the foolhardy convention that there’s no such thing as a Trojan Horse?

Ayodele Chieng | Irving Street, in Petit Bourg.