Secondly, the Registrar's letter is misleading in so far as it speaks of an "offer" from me to index the Reports. I should like it to be absolutely clear that the initiative in this affair came from the profession and from the judiciary and not from me. In the language of contract, I was the offeree throughout and not the offeror. You will recall that when originally approached informally by the Bar Committee in July in relation to the continuing failure to produce the Re- ports for 1965-67, I offered to put my experience of legal editing at the disposal of those concerned in bringing the Reports up to date. I had no intention at that time of becoming involved in indexing, a horse of a very different colour. Indeed, I made it brutally clear both to the Bar Committee and to the Chief Justice when I was first asked whether I would consider an offer to do the index, that I regarded the task as unpleasant, onerous and inimical to my other interests and that I would therefore undertake it only if the financial compensation offered was sufficiently attrac- tive. I did, however, agree to do some preliminary work and to set out what I thought needed to be done, and, as I understand it, the scheme I then produced was approved by both Bar and Law Society and by the judiciary. Thereafter it was simply a question as to whether the money could be found so that an offer could be made to me, and had such an offer been made there is no question but that I would have been free to consider its terms and to accept or reject it.
Thirdly, and to my mind more important, I very much regret the way the Registrar's letter leaves the impression that the responsibility for the breakdown of the project was mine. The reason why, in my letter to Sir Michael Hogan of November 28th, I cut down on what I had originally thought I might undertake was simply that up to that time no proposal had been made to me. The reason I withdrew altogether on December 1st was equally simply because it
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