27
01
2011
… Bridget O’Rawe v William Trimble Limited … [2010] NIQB 135 … is one of the few libel cases to go to trial in recent times in Northern Ireland and the judgement is not only extremely detailed but provides long awaited clarification from the bench in relation to qualified privilege and particularisation of pleadings.
BusyBody was talking about her case at chambers tea yesterday which involves a student appealing a decision by his college to expel him. ‘It was a complete kangaroo court,’ she said.
‘I’ve always loved the image that conjures up,’ said TheVamp. ‘You know, a huge kangaroo of a judge and all the little joeys coming up before him and with none of them able to sit still for a second. All bouncing up and down on the spot trying to make their submissions.’
There are more clichés and metaphors in the post, but this passage raises a profound issue: Is this really how college decisions to expel students are taken?
Eugene Volokh • January 25, 2011 5:32 pm
The article is The Bluebook Blues, published in the Yale Law Journal, which is one of the journals that publishes the Bluebook itself. The review is short (a bit over 10 pages of text) and very readable. An excerpt:
Many years ago I wrote a review of The Bluebook, then in its sixteenth edition. My review was naïvely entitled “Goodbye to the Bluebook.” The Bluebook was then a grotesque 255 pages long. It is now in its nineteenth edition — which is 511 pages long.
I made a number of specific criticisms of The Bluebook in that piece, and I will not repeat them. I don’t believe that any of them have been heeded, but I am not certain, because, needless to say, I have not read the nineteenth edition. I have dipped into it, much as one might dip one’s toes in a pail of freezing water. I am put in mind of Mr. Kurtz’s dying words in Heart of Darkness — “The horror! The horror!” — and am tempted to end there.
Amid all the discussion regarding the A., B. and C. v. Ireland judgment, it is interesting to note that last week, in one of its first freedom of expression judgments of 2011, the European Court of Human Rights was called upon to consider an interesting issue surrounding abortion, namely the conviction for defamation of an anti-abortion activist for comparing abortion to the Holocaust.
The applicants in Hoffer v. Germany were anti-abortion activists who had handed out pamphlets outside a medical clinic in Nuremburg.
This post on the Strasbourg Observers blog was written by Rónán Ó Fathaigh, a researcher working on a Ghent University Special Research Fund project entitled “Legal analysis and explorative research of the chilling effect on freedom of expression and information”.
Putting your shirt on it
January 22nd, 2011 [link]
BRIAN FLANAGAN
WE ARE SAID to be living in an era of “cosmopolitan constitutionalism”, in which lawyers and judges increasingly look abroad for guidance when interpreting their own constitutions.
The practice is controversial in the US, where Congress has denounced references to the law of European nations in cases concerning sexual equality and the death penalty.
A judge is said to use “foreign law” when he or she interprets domestic laws by reference to the law of other nations.
In an Irish context, it would include seeking guidance from US Supreme Court decisions say, but not from those of the European Court of Human Rights, whose authority Ireland has officially recognised.
Establishing why judges look abroad, how often they do it, and which sorts of countries they look to will reveal whether “cosmopolitan constitutionalism” is likely to benefit the development of Irish law.
Brian Flanagan is a lecturer in the department of law at NUI Maynooth. He and Sinéad Ahern, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at UL, conducted an international survey of Supreme Court judges in which the judges were asked in confidence about their use of foreign law. The results will be published in the International Comparative Law Quarterly.
Lecturers protest over Croke Park deal
JOANNE HUNT
MORE THAN 200 university and institute of technology lecturers met in Dublin on Saturday to protest against the implementation of the Croke Park agreement in third-level institutions.
The group, which met in the Gresham Hotel, is seeking to protect the right of academics to permanency and tenure until retirement age. They said this “bedrock on which academic freedom rests” was under threat.
The Croke Park deal, along with the Hunt report on higher education, proposes longer working hours and shorter holidays, tighter management control and performance-related pay.
They also open up the possibility that academics deemed to be substandard by management could be sacked.
SEANAD REPORT: ACADEMIC FREEDOM must be protected in view of the fact that some of the important criticisms of what had been happening in this country in recent years had come from people in academia rather than from the Oireachtas, Rónán Mullen (Ind) said.
One hundred and fifty academics had criticised proposals in the Croke Park agreement, which they claimed would pose a serious threat to academic freedom.
Referring to a letter published in The Irish Times, Mr Mullen said its signatories had said there was a threat to the right to permanency and tenure to retirement age, which was the bedrock on which academic freedom rested. He thought it was very important that academic freedom would not be undermined when one considered the sources of criticisms of the way the country had been governed.
The definition of the right of academic tenure should not be achieved at the expense of the rights of those holding temporary positions, he also argued.
It’s not often I agree with Ronán Mullen, but I’m glad that he now agrees with me! See my posts on the various legal protections of academic freedom and tenure.
The letter to which he refers is here.
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