[LEAPSECS] The relation between calendars and leap seconds.

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Jonathan E. Hardis wrote:


>   * Who can cite case law, where a court has had to decide an actual

>     controversy on timekeeping?  (Courts don't deal with hypothetical

>     controversies or arguments over trivia.  De minimis non curat lex.)


Curtis v. March, cited earlier in the quotations from Halsbury's, 
establishing the proposition in English law that custom setting clocks in 
a way at variance with what the time is according to the law does not 
change what the time is according to the law.  (If time signals, and so 
clocks, were to diverge from GMT with the law remaining referencing GMT, 
this could become relevant again; the original context was when clocks 
generally were set to GMT but the common law was that time was local mean 
time.)

Miller v. Community Links Trust Ltd (UKEAT/0486/07), where a claim that 
arrived nine seconds late was held to be out of time.  (The timekeeping 
was not in dispute in this case, but if GMT and the time used by time 
signals and computer clocks had diverged by nine seconds then a claim the 
computer ruled was out of time by being received at 00:00:08 could in fact 
have arrived at 23:59:59 GMT and so be in time according to the law.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm at polyomino.org.uk