International Law

Privacy Headlines

Posted on September 27, 2008
From today’s Irish Independent Politicians, not public, want laws on privacy Politicians are ‘crusading’ for stricter privacy laws despite just one-in-five formal complaints coming from the public. A survey of Irish journalism reveals that two thirds of privacy complaints against newspapers and broadcasters come from public figures, particularly politicians, with only one fifth from private citizens...

The disjointed progress of the Defamation Bill, 2006

Posted on September 25, 2008
As the Dáil resumed yesterday, last week’s post on libel tourism has prompted me to pick up the story of the tortuous progress of the Defamation Bill, 2006 through the Houses of the Oireachtas [the Houses of Parliament]. When we left it on this blog, it had just scraped the through the Seanad [the Senate, [...

Go on, give it a swirl!

Posted on September 25, 2008

Regulating anonymous blogs?

Posted on September 24, 2008
An article by Marcel Berlins in today’s Guardian raises the issue of internet libel, espcially by anonymous bloggers: The web encourages lies and deceit. It’s impossible to know who lurks behind a funny nickname On the whole, I can’t complain too much about the readers who respond to my column online … [but] I seriously considered suing [...

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Footnote on Fees and Funding

Posted on September 23, 2008
As the debate about the reintroduction of some form of third level fees rumbles on, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) - a UK think tank established in 2002 with the laudable aim of ensuring that higher education policy development in the UK is informed by research and by knowledge of the experience of others [...

The Judiciary: Who they are and their everyday work

Posted on September 23, 2008
The School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin will host a presentation by Prof Sharyn Roach Anleu under the above title at 4pm, Thursday 2nd October 2008, in the Robert Emmet Lecture Theatre (Room 2037, Arts Building (Map)), Trinity College Dublin...

Hari Puttar and the Delhi High Court

Posted on September 22, 2008
By way of updating my earlier post Is Harry Potter making a Parody of Copyright Law? the BBC has the following report: Warner Bros lose Hari Puttar case A court in the Indian capital Delhi has rejected a lawsuit filed by Hollywood company Warner Bros against the makers of a Bollywood film Hari Puttar...

Pressing statistics

Posted on September 22, 2008
The statistics for the first six months of operation of the Press Ombudsman make for interesting reading. According to Ruadán Mac Cormaic in the Irish Times over the weekend: Press Ombudsman gets 200 complaints ALMOST 200 complaints were made to the Press Ombudsman in the office’s first six months in operation, new figures show...

Today is OneWebDay

Posted on September 21, 2008

Censoring Theatre in Britain and Ireland

Posted on September 21, 2008
The Licensing Act, 1737, by requiring that every play to be performed on the English stage must first get a licence from the Lord Chamberlain, effectively constituted him a censor of the theatre until the repeal of the Act by the Theatres Act 1968. An exhibition just opened in the British Library The Golden Generation, [...

Blawg Review #164

Posted on June 15, 2008
0. Prolegomenon, or Why me? Today is Bloomsday, the centrepiece of a weeklong festival in Dublin celebrating the day in 1904 on which the events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses unfold, which is the day Joyce first formally went out with Nora Barnacle (the story is told in the enthralling movie Nora; other movies with 16 [...

So is iTunes U good for you?

Posted on June 12, 2008
Last week, Trinity College Dublin became the first university in Ireland and one of the first in Europe to launch its own iTunes U site (press release | BBC | Irish Independent | Irish Times | Learning Tech | Lex Ferenda | Silicon Republic | Techno Culture | The Guardian)...

What do University Presidents do all day?

Posted on June 05, 2008
I’ve often wondered what my ultimate boss, John Hegarty, Provost of Trinity College Dublin, does all day. Now we mortals at the bottom of the university ladder might actually find out what university presidents do all day. Now Ferdinand von Prondzynski, President of Dublin City University (DCU), has started a blog in which he promises [...

Say No to Ageism

Posted on May 19, 2008
This week is Say No to Ageism Week. It is an initiative of the National Council for the Advancement of Older People, the Equality Authority, and the Health Service Executive; and it will be launched by today in the Equality Authority’s offices by Maire Hoctor TD, Minister of State with responsibility for Older People...

Universities and Patents

Posted on April 28, 2008
In Ireland, the law relating to patents is governed by the Patents Act, 1992 (here and here) as amended in 2006 (here and here). According to the Irish Patents Office, a patent confers upon its holder, for a limited period, the right to exclude others from exploiting (making, using, selling, importing) the patented invention, except with [...

Data Privacy: Three Cautionary Tales

Posted on April 22, 2008
On front page of this morning’s Irish Times, Karlin Lillington writes Garda powers of request for internet data to be widened THE RANGE of criminal investigations for which the Garda will be able to request e-mail and internet data retained by internet service providers has been broadened by the Government...

The Case of the Mistaken Flights

Posted on April 18, 2008
Look up, it’s Aer Lingus Aer Lingus used to know how to do public relations - in my youth a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, it had three very powerful advertising campaigns which had a profound effect on me. One used the Gallagher & Lyle song “Breakaway” (YouTube) featuring the lyric “breakaway, [...

More on Baze v Rees

Posted on April 16, 2008
As Bridget said in the comments to yesterday’s post about the US Supreme Court’s decision in the death penalty case, Baze v Rees: Intellectual commentary might come later. Here’s my first try.

US Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of the lethal injection

Posted on April 16, 2008
On the day when the President of the United States welcomes the Pope to the White House, the long-awaited decision of the US Supreme Court on the compatibility of the lethal injection with the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution has been handed down...

Incitement to Anorexia

Posted on April 16, 2008
L’Assemblée nationale française (the lower house of the French parliment) yesterday passed a “Draft law aimed at fighting incitement to seek extreme thinness or anorexia” providing for fines of to ?30,000 and terms of imprisonment of up to two years for inciting to “excessive thinness” and more if the incitement results in death (see Associated [...

Something must be done - II

Posted on March 29, 2008
The moral of the story in my previous post about cars being preceded by men carrying red flags is that fear of the new often leads to unnecessary regulation. For this reason, in the context of the internet, we need to be careful about over-reaction and over-regulation...

Something must be done - I

Posted on March 27, 2008
It is human nature to fear the new. And for many of us, the internet is still new. I have pointed out before that Lilian Edwards observes (in “The internet and security: do we need a man with a red flag walking in front of every computer?” (2007) 4 (1) SCRIPT-ed 1 (March 2007)), rather [...

Complaints against lawyers

Posted on March 25, 2008
The Office of the Legal Services Ombudsman for England and Wales and the Office of the Scottish Legal Services Ombudsman were established in 1990. There are plans afoot for their reform (Scotland | England & Wales) but the basic principle of independent oversight of disciplinary matters for the legal professions will not only remain [...

Golden moments?

Posted on March 21, 2008
The Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is 50 this year, and its famous symbol is 50 today (hat tip: Opinio Juris; BBC): The images (from left to right) are the first ceramic CND badge, an early tin badge, and the current badge. The symbol was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a professional artist and graduate of [...

It?s about time

Posted on March 18, 2008
For too long, Irish universities have hoped that the many developments in graduate funding to develop a Fourth Level in the Irish university sector in recent years would trickle down to offset the ongoing cuts in third level undergraduate funding. It hasn’t happened...

So farewell then, Norman French (again)

Posted on March 18, 2008
I have blogged already (here and here) about the Statute Law Revision Act, 2007. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Oireachtas should feel very flattered indeed. Earlier this year, the Law Commissions of England and Wales and of Scotland published their 18th report in a series of proposed statute law repeals [...

Carnival! Carnival!

Posted on March 16, 2008
Blawg Review describes itself as the blog carnival for everyone interested in law: A peer-reviewed blog carnival, the host of each Blawg Review decides which of the submissions and recommended posts are suitable for inclusion in the presentation. And the host is encouraged to source another dozen or so interesting posts to fit with any special [...

Manhunt II and the value of persistence

Posted on March 16, 2008
The Manhunt II saga is probably finally over in the UK (hat tip: Daithí off-blog), but perhaps there is one further stage left in Ireland. As readers of this blog will know, last June the Irish Film Censor’s Office (IFCO), exercised its power to ban Rockstar Games’ Manhunt II, following the lead of many other [...

Isn?t it funny, how a bear likes honey?

Posted on March 15, 2008
As every fan of a certain bear knows: Isn’t it funny How a bear likes honey? Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! I wonder why he does? AA Milne, Winnie The Pooh (1926) As if to prove this, the BBC is reporting that the taste of honey was just too tempting for a bear in Macedonia, which repeatedly raided a beekeeper’s hives, and has [...

Reforming Legal Education, or not

Posted on March 14, 2008
Surprisingly, according to Wordpress Blog Stats, the most popular page on this blog yesterday was The Future of Irish Legal Education, about the second annual Legal Education Symposium hosted by UCC’s Faculty of Law and sponsored by Dillon Eustace Solicitors...

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