International Law

Fulsome pedantry

Posted on September 15, 2009
Yesterday, one Irish politician called on another to make an apology to the Irish people. This would just be another forgettable eddy in a political coffee cup were it not for the fact that the demand was for a “fulsome” apology. Can this be right? The Oxford English Dictionary (pictured left) in its entry (sub [...

The shape of (third-level) things to come?

Posted on September 14, 2009
Techdirt points to an article in Washington Monthly which raises the possibility of College for $99 a Month. The theme of the piece is that the next generation of online education could be great for students, but catastrophic for universities. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about...

Death of a libel tourist

Posted on September 14, 2009
The letters’ page of the Irish Times as often features well-crafted prose and well-argued cases as it does pithily funny remarks and occasionally insane arguments. In any event, a letter often serves either to remind me of an article I had not properly considered, or to bring to my attention a piece I had simply [...

Peak productivity

Posted on September 13, 2009
From the ever-wonderful Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD), a graduate student comic strip: If you like this post, please click on this link to pass it on. Thanks! Hide Sites $$('div.d3688').each( function(e) { e.visualEffect('slide_up',{duration:0...

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New kids on the block

Posted on September 11, 2009
I’ve just discovered the wonderful new(ish) blog Human Rights in Ireland, a group blog about – well, the clue is in the name – human rights issues in Ireland and on Irish scholarship about human rights more generally. With apologies for the nkotb title, I can say without fear of contradiction that there’s lots of [...

Academic freedom and DNA privacy

Posted on September 10, 2009
Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the scientist behind DNA fingerprinting, in a BBC interview to mark the 25th anniversary of that discovery, has spoken of the importance of allowing academics freedom to research. He said that academics should be able to pursue “unfettered, fundamental, curiosity-driven” research of the kind which led to his discovery...

100 years of Legal Scholars

Posted on September 07, 2009
And so to the University of Keele, for the centenary conference of the Society of Legal Scholars in the United Kingdom and Ireland (SLS). The SLS is a leading learned society for those who teach law in a university or similar institution or who are otherwise engaged in legal scholarship, and many of the events [...

Tech support

Posted on September 06, 2009
From xkcd, via Rumble Strips, a flowchart with which we can all identify – sometimes I’m the tech support, sometimes the baffled “not computer person”: Bonus links from xkcd (1): some other entertaining flowcharts; (2) a very clever Legal Hack; and (3) my favourite, a chess photo! If you like this post, please click on this link [...

Journalism and Blogging in the New York Review of Books

Posted on September 05, 2009
There is a wonderful essay by Michael Massing in the current edition of the New York Review of Books about the deepening relationship between print and online journalism. In form, it’s a review of Eric Boehlert Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press (Free Press | Amazon), which traces the [...

A salutary tale of a mistaken price

Posted on September 04, 2009
Via ContractsProf, I learn that US discount retailer Best Buy will not honour a $9.99 big-screen TV deal which it had offered for sale on its website, because the terms on the site reserved its right to revoke offers or correct errors even if a credit card has already been charged...

Announcing the Irish Law Quarterly

Posted on September 03, 2009
It is exciting news that there is to be a new online peer-reviewed Irish law journal, the Irish Law Quarterly. (Don’t be cynical: it is exciting news; and the world – or at least Ireland – really does need another one). According to the home page: The ILQ is an innovative journal which aims at broad [...

Globalisation alla Berlusconi: libel suits in many jurisdictions

Posted on September 02, 2009
Here we go again with yet another case of a head of state seeking to use the courts to curb uncomfortable press coverage. It is a popular tactic the world over – Charlie Haughey infamously relied on threats of libel action to stifle investigation of his private and financial affairs – and it is [...

From Lefkowitz via lines to Limerick

Posted on September 01, 2009
It has become a rite of passage to stand in lines overnight or longer to be early in line to buy concert tickets, or houses off the plans (at least during now extinct Celtic Tiger years), or places in a school, or early into a sale in a favourite shop...

University Reform would set a Dangerous Precedent!

Posted on August 24, 2009
On the process by which decisions are taken in the University, Intersecting Sets has this quote from Cornford’s sardonic Microcosmographia Academica (html | pdf): No one can tell the difference between a Liberal Conservative Caucus and a Conservative Liberal one...

Laff, laff

Posted on August 23, 2009
On Australia Day, if you can’t forget Skippy, then you can’t forget Lassie either. From Strange Brew via the Language Log: Language Log adds a further joke – I wonder if Simon Fodden would call this a lapdog? If you like this post, please click on this link to pass it on...

Two journalists? conceptions of source privilege

Posted on August 22, 2009
In today’s Irish Times obituary of Robert Novak (pictured left, on the cover of his autobiography), there is an excellent summary of the Judith Miller affair. From the obituary (with added links): Conservative US columnist revealed identity of CIA officer … Six years ago, he crowned his long record of controversial disclosures by revealing the name and [...

Stop Press: Vincent Browne recants!

Posted on August 17, 2009
In his column in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post, Vincent Browne (to coin a phrase, the éminence terrible of Irish journalism, pictured left) gives a guarded welcome to the Defamation Act, 2009, and pours cold water on the recent Supreme Court decision about journalist source privilege...

Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer

Posted on August 16, 2009
… You’ll wish that summer could always be here Nat King Cole Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer Or not, if you’re five: If you like this post, please click on this link to pass it on. Thanks! Hide Sites $$('div...

Lawyers for Typography

Posted on August 14, 2009
A little while I ago, I blogged about the deservedly-popular site Typography for Lawyers; now a story by Joel Alas in the Financial Times (hat tip: The Faculty Lounge) brings news of lawyers for typography, or more to the point, potential litigation about the most (in)famous font type in the world – Times New Roman...

Towards an All Black Book?

Posted on August 13, 2009
By way of update to my post on Legal Citation, I note that Geoff McLay on 15 Lambton Quay (the Faculty Blog for the Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law) writes: The proposed uniform legal style guide for New Zealand A group of academics, editors and publishers led by myself and Justice Chambers has been developing [...

The elements of academic freedom

Posted on August 12, 2009
As universities grapple with reducing budgets, their autonomy from government comes increasingly under scrutiny, and traditional academic values such as academic freedom come under threat. As a consequence, a recent story in Times Higher Education concerning a recent attempt to define academic freedom in detail, makes for fascinating reading (with added links): What is freedom? Choosing [...

Who will examine the examiners?

Posted on August 11, 2009
Marking exams, grading papers, and evaluating assessments are the bane of academics’ lives (even worse, in my view, than the ever multiplying waves of administrative paperwork that seem to be taking over the university). During the early summer annual exam marking season, Mary Beard and Ferdinand von Prondzynski had some interesting observations about the process; [...

Report of the Working Group on a Court of Appeal

Posted on August 10, 2009
I’ve written about this report twice already. The first occasion was when a committee chaired by Ms Justice Susan Denham of the Supreme Court was established to consider the necessity for a new Irish Court of Appeal (this was in part a response to an article on the point which Judge Denham had written the [...

Mobile phones, again

Posted on August 09, 2009
Given my views about mobile phones in class, I’m grateful to John Naughton for his post about this YouTube clip: If you like this post, please click on this link to pass it on. Thanks! Hide Sites $$('div.d3238').each( function(e) { e...

FoE in the EHRLR

Posted on August 08, 2009
The current issue of the European Human Rights Law Review ([2009] 3 EHRLR | table of contents (pdf) | hat tip ECHR blog) contains a wonderful piece by my colleague Ewa Komorek entitled “Is Media Pluralism a Human Right? The European Court of Human Rights, the Council of Europe and the Issue of Media Pluralism” [...

Ding, ding! Seconds out, round one: National Portrait Gallery Wikipedia v Wikipedia

Posted on August 07, 2009
Roll up, roll up, for the next great online copyright bout. In the red corner, weighing in at almost 153 years old, is the venerable National Portrait Gallery, an institutional heavyweight if ever there was one. In the blue corner, weighing in at just over 8 years old, is the upstart Wikipedia, a sprightly bantamweight [...

Open access in the Irish Times

Posted on August 07, 2009
I have written several times on this blog about open access journals, and I have re-posted some of the wickedly funny cartoons served up daily by Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD). Open access journals are the focus of PhD’s cartoon yesterday (it’s too big to repost here, but click through and enjoy – then come [...

Identity theft, unilateral mistake as to identity, and wordle

Posted on August 06, 2009
I can’t make up my mind whether wordle is a pretty annoying gimmick or an useful analytical tool which produces pretty results. The image on the left is a wordle anaylsis of the interesting decision of the House of Lords in Shogun Finance v Hudson [2004] 1 AC 1101, [2003] UKHL 62 (19 November 2003) [...

The political advertising ban rears its ugly head again

Posted on August 06, 2009
I’m sorry I’m coming to this too late to attend the gig, but I’ve only just seen this piece by Lorna Siggins in today’s Irish Times (with added links): RTÉ denies censorship of Afri advert over Rossport reference RTÉ has denied that it has refused to broadcast an advertisement for a social event in Dublin tonight that [...

The decreasing value of an academic reference

Posted on August 05, 2009
A New York woman who says she cannot find a job is suing the college where she obtained a bachelor’s degree, because the college’s Office of Career Advancement did not provide her with the leads and career advice it had promised. Perhaps someone somewhere along the line didn’t write her a good enough reference...

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