Juvenal – cearta.ie

A little while ago, I argued that liberty, democracy and the rule of law together constitute the constitutional trinity on which many modern states are founded, and that, not only are there the traditionally understood strong liberal and democratic justifications for freedom of expression, there are also equally strong free speech justifications founded in the rule of law. In yesterday’s decision in R (on the application of Guardian News and Media Ltd) v City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court [2012] EWCA Civ 420 (03 April 2012), the Court of Appeal for England and Wales made this point in rhetoric of great eloquence, perspicuity and vigour (though the judgments are curiously ambivalent in their ambit and ambition).

In my earlier post, I argued that, a commitment to the rule of law – where law is equally applied in open court by an impartial judiciary – both reinforces and is reinforced by robust protection of freedom of expression. The proper protection of fundamental rights reinforces the necessity for the protection of free speech as one of those fundamental rights. The proper functioning of impartial judicial tribunals is reinforced by the protection of free speech, which ensures monitoring of and comment upon the operation of such tribunals.…

Lust, Satire and Academic Insularity

25 September, 20094 April, 2012

| 3 Comments

| Juvenal, Universities

As a counterpoint to the THE‘s piece on The seven deadly sins of the academy, about which I wrote here, Mary Beard has exasperatedly pointed out that the entry about lust was – as the author himself has also had to explain – satirical:

Sex with students? Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal?

… I hadn’t realised that there was a storm about Terence Kealey‘s piece on Lust … So I took a look at it. … It was instantly clear to me that this was SATIRE. … Taking several more, careful looks at the Kealey piece, I was left in no doubt that he was aiming his darts at the ways crude sexual exploitation of female students gets justified, by satircally mimicking the locker room style in which it is discussed. Come on everyone, NO VICE-CHANCELLOR (not even of Buckingham) calls women students a “perk” unless satirically (and aiming a dart at precisely those assumptions). Honest.

It was however a dreadful experience looking not only at the press reports of all this but also the comments of the THE website (some of which were presumably written by academics, who showed no ability to read or understand satire AT ALL .

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Who will examine the examiners?

11 August, 20094 April, 2012

| 3 Comments

| Grading and Marking, Juvenal, Universities

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; now, just in time for the late summer repeat exam marking season, Peter Black enters the fray; and all of their observations remind me of the classic guide to grading exams which I commend to all hard-pressed examiners out there. …

Who will keep the keepers?

23 February, 200917 April, 2016

| 5 Comments

| Cyberlaw, Digital Rights, Juvenal

Cover of the IJLIT omment on this blog that the Roman poet Juvenal asked Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who will watch the watchers?). Emily B Laidlaw, in her fascinating article, Private Power, Public Interest: An Examination of Search Engine Accountability, raises the parallel question of who will keep the keepers? In the vast new information age bequeathed to us by the internet and the world wide web, gatekeepers are those who enable – and control – our access to that information. At present, they are all private entities, and even if they wish to do no evil, there is no reason why they should actually do some good, let alone act in the public interest. Laidlaw’s analysis therefore focuses on the important issue, who will keep the (gate)keepers; here’s the abstract:

As information becomes a critical commodity in modern society, the issue is raised whether the entities that manage access to information, that are tools for public discourse and democracy, should be accountable to the public. The Internet has transformed how we communicate, and search engines have emerged as managers of information, organizing and categorizing content in a coherent, accessible manner thereby shaping the Internet user’s experience.

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Who will google Google?

27 May, 200717 April, 2016

| 10 Comments

| Digital Rights, Juvenal, Media and Communications, Privacy

The Roman poet Juvenal asked Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who will watch the watchers?). In a similar vein, one of Elvis Costello‘s more acidic songs of loss is ‘Watching the Detectives’ (lyrics | lyrics with images | YouTube). If Google is the search engine which does (most of) our detecting for us, one of the animating questions of the moment is who is watching the Google detective on our behalf? One answer is provided by Article 29 of Directive 95/46/EC (also here) of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data