Hat tips – Political Advertising; Privacy
This message is by way of catching up with two important developments this week, and thanking those fellow bloggers who brought them to my attention.
First up, political advertising. …
Author: Eoin
Dr Eoin O'Dell is a Fellow and Associate Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin.
Law in the Real World
Hot on the heels of the Carneige Foundation‘s report on Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (which I have already discussed on this blog) comes Law in the Real World: Improving our Understanding of How Law Works (pdf) by Prof Dame Hazel Genn of UCL. It was launched in London at the British Academy on 6 November 2006 last (and welcomed here and here) – sorry I’ve only come upon it now. It makes for important, if uncomfortable, reading: its importance is self-evident, but it is discomfiting because of how little of this type of research is being undertaken in Ireland in the kind of systematic manner advocted in this report.…
What is the Preamble to a Constitution for?
For various reasons, the question in the title has come up several times today. As a first thought, it seems to me that the Preamble to a Constitution sets out some general aspirational sentiments about the nature of the polity being created by that Constitution. It is a general statement which introduces the document and its purposes, ambitions, principles, and commitments, and thereby serves to explain its raison d’etre. In modern American parlance, it’s where the polity puts ‘the vision thing‘ for its members and others to find. Such broad brush strokes are inappropriate for binding text, but, because it is an expression of the polity’s vision, it is a useful aid for guiding the interpretation of the text which follows. Famously, the Preamble to the US Constitution does this in a single sentence. That to the Irish Constitution is a little longer.
So, my question is this: is the above paragraph a fair summary of what constitutional preambles do, or not?…
Dublin Legal Workshop this week [was: ‘next week’]
This Next week, there are not one but two sessions in the Dublin Legal Workshop series.
First up: the evening stream of the Dublin Legal Workshop is meant largely as a forum for external speakers to share ideas in Trinity. In this stream, at update: 6.30pm (and not 6.00pm as earlier announced) next Tuesday evening, 3 April 2007, in Room 11 of the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin (map here), Andrea Martin, solicitor and media law specialist (who has already featured on this blog), will give a talk entitled:
“Right of Reply – a Workable Proposition for the Media?â€?
Second: the afternoon stream of the Dublin Legal Workshop is meant largely as a forum for work in progress by the postgraduate research students and academic staff of the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin. In this stream, at 1.00pm next Wednesday afternoon, 4 April 2007, in the Law School’s library, Des Ryan, a research student, tutor, and part-time lecturer in the Law School (pictured left), will present a paper entitled:
“Tort Law, Public Authorities, Rights and Wrongs�.
If you are interested, please do come along. They should each be enjoyable and informative presentations.…
The Treatment of Suretyships in the EU: Unhappy Families?
All families are happy in the same fashion,
and each family is unhappy in its own way.Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
in Anna Karenina (1875-1877)
Banks lend money; but they are averse to the risks of this lending, so they usually require security for the money they lend. One form of security is to get another, creditworthy, person to agree to pay the loan if the borrower fails to do so. This arrangement is called a suretyship, and the person who undertakes to pay if the borrower does not is called a surety.
Do sureties need protection from the borrowers or lenders? For example, if a husband and wife have interests in the family home, and the wife agrees to secure a loan to her husband against her interest in the family home, does a vulnerable wife need protection either from an overbearing husband or an unscrupulous bank here? …
“The right of a free press to communicate information without let or restraint is intrinsic to a free and democratic society”
I have recently commented on this blog that the right to freedom of expression Article 40.6.1(i) has finally got some teeth!?. That process continued today in the Supreme Court, where Fennelly J uttered the line used as the title to this post. …
Fair Use – Recalibrating the balance in Fair Dealing
This is a call to arms; or at least, a call for legislation which would radically recast EU copyright law.
Intellectual property law and policy are all about innovation, both encouraging it and protecting its fruits. But these are potentially opposing, perhaps even incompatible, goals: if we reward one innovator with a monopoly over the fruits of the innovation, prohibiting others’ use of those fruits, then we risk preventing the next round of innovation. The challenge to law-makers is to strike the an appropriate balance between reward and innovation, by pitching the length of the monopoly at the right level, both in the breadth of its coverage and the length of its term, beyond which others might also use it.
The story of copyright provides a good example of this dilemma. …
Refunding unincurred airport taxes and charges
A payment made on a basis which fails can be recovered. So, if I pay for cigarettes, and the price includes an amount for a tax which is subsequently found unconstitutional, the basis for that excess amount has failed, and I can recover the tax amount that wasn’t due (see Roxborough v Rothmans of Pall Mall Australia Limited (2001) 208 CLR 516; [2001] HCA 68 (6 December 2001)). It follows that if I book to travel with an airline, and pay their fee plus taxes and charges, but if I then don’t travel, so that the charges are not incurred and the taxes are not due, the basis for those taxes and charges has failed, and I ought to be able to recover them. If the contract between me and the airline contains clauses making them irrecoverable, (or, what amounts to the same thing, imposing disproportionately high administration fees) such clauses are almost certainly unenforceable (on foot of the European Communities (Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts) Regulations, 1995 (S.I. No. 27 of 1995), the English equivalent of which have recently been applied by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) against an airline’s terms and conditions).
These musings are prompted by the following story in the Price Watch column in today’s Irish Times (sub req’d):
…No guaranteed refund if you don’t take your Ryanair flight
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