Category: General
Suicide in the media
From today’s Observer, an article by Carole Cadwalladr that makes the case for the ethical reporting of suicide:
…How Bridgend was damned by distortion
… the Bridgend suicides are a case unto themselves. I ask Dr Lars Johansson of Umeå University, Sweden, who has published several papers on teenage suicide, about other, larger clusters, but there hasn’t ever been one. It is the largest teen suicide cluster of modern times, he says, and there’s never been a cluster reported as sensationally, as comprehensively, as widely, or for as long. … But now that the media furore has died down, so have the deaths. Is that a coincidence? And is it just another coincidence that the highest incidence of deaths occurred when the media reporting of the phenomenon was at its height?
The available academic research on the subject of media and suicide is damning: that there is a clear, documented link. And that our thirst for the story looks, from this distance, like a sort of bloodlust. … ever since the first modern research into media and suicide was undertaken in 1974 by the sociologist David Phillips, it’s been known that mass media can be a factor in contagion.
Back to the future of law reviews?
There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.
Fred Rodell “Goodbye to Law Reviews” 23 Virginia Law Review 38 (1936) at 38.
Leaving aside their citation styles, there may be a third problem with law reviews: their paper format. The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, calling for the wholesalde abandonment of paper in favour of exclusively online publication, has been causing a small stir of late:
Objective: The undersigned believe that it will benefit legal education and improve the dissemination of legal scholarly information if law schools commit to making the legal scholarship they publish available in stable, open, digital formats in place of print. To accomplish this end, law schools should commit to making agreed-upon stable, open, digital formats, rather than print, the preferable formats for legal scholarship. If stable, open, digital formats are available, law schools should stop publishing law journals in print and law libraries should stop acquiring print law journals. ….
See Berkman | Goodson Blogson | Law Librarian Blog | Legal Research Plus | Legal Writing Prof Blog | Library Boy. This is not a new claim, and I agree that this kind of approach represents the future of law reviews, but this call strikes me as premature.…
Legal citation, again
Updating Legal citation:
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Bonus link: Offences against the library (via Daithí) updates Consequences.…
Serendipity
One of my favourite blogs meets one of my favourite radio prgrammes.
This is how the radio show’s website introduced the programme:
The Destruction of Carthage – “Delenda Carthago!”
The North African city of Carthage was rich and powerful, but in the second century BC it suffered a terrible fate. … Carthage was destroyed by Rome and destroyed utterly; its people scattered and its library broken up. The Romans removed Carthage from history with such effect that it’s hard to know the city save through Roman eyes. But the ghosts of Carthage haunted the citizens of Rome and for many Romans the destruction of opulent and civilised Carthage was not a moment of triumph, but a harbinger of Rome’s own fate.
This is how the blog described the programme:
…In Our Time
Rome vs Carthage can be a pretty blokeish subject, so it was a nice dare to have an all-woman panel: me, Ellen O’Gorman from Bristol and Jo Crawley Quinn from Oxford. … we managed to come down on different sides of one key Carthage question: what was the city like in the third century BC, just before the Punic wars.
Jo and Ellen took the view that it was really opulent, the Queen of the Mediterranean or (as Jo put it) “the New York of the third century BC’.
Blessed are the cheesemakers
Scene II, the Sermon on the Mount, from the perspective of back of the crowd, where Jesus can barely be heard over the hubub:
GREGORY: What was that? …
MAN #1: I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’ …
MRS. GREGORY: Ahh, what’s so special about the cheesemakers?
GREGORY: Well, obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
Inspired by Cheese maker settles case over ingredient claim…
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