Symposium on “The Master Switch”
posted by Gerard Magliocca
I am pleased to announce that Concurring Opinions will host a symposium this week on Tim Wu’s The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. .. I’m looking forward to a fun exchange of ideas about Tim’s book, which you can purchase here.
Under changes announced last Friday (11th), DNA profiles and fingerprints taken from people who have been arrested but never charged or convicted of a crime will be destroyed. Previously, police had powers to keep these records indefinitely. This legislation draws heavily on the recommendations made by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the 2007 report ‘The forensic use of bioinformation: ethical issues’ which had suggested that the law in England, Wales and Northern Ireland should be brought into line with Scotland, where other than in exceptional cases, DNA profiles and biological samples from a person are kept permanently on record only if they have been convicted of a recordable offence.
This post, by David O’Dwyer, doctoral student at the Centre for Criminal Justice at the University of Limerick, updates my post on Retention of DNA, and the effect of decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. There is a good piece in the Guardian about the issue: DNA profiles to be deleted from police database. And Cian Murphy has an excellent discussion of the Bill in which the DNA proposals are to be found: Protection of Freedoms Bill Published. Magna Carta Unfazed.
Last Summer, the 7th edition of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (the “McGill Guide”) introduced this “General Rule” at p. E-3:
“In citations, omit periods when using an abbreviation or acronym, unless the Guide explains otherwise.”
The change entailed by this low key sentence has a very significant impact. Indeed, each and every example in the Guide is now free of the useless periods we have come to get used to. What a nice and overdue clean-up! …
Major legal citation guides in the UK (OSCOLA, s. 1.3.1) and Australia (AGLC, s. 1.6.1) clearly forbid the use of “full stops” in abbreviations and initials found in citations.
Some orders have been made on foot of the Defamation Act, 2009 (also here) – see, for example, Lowry v Smyth (background here and here; coverage of the order here), Mellon v Associated Newspapers (coverage here), and Meegan v Associated Newspapers (coverage here) – but Watters v Independent Star [2010] IECC 1 (03 November 2010) remains the only reported judgment on provisions of the Act. In that case, the newspaper had published an article headlined Larry’s Secret Shower Buddy, purporting to expose a a “seedy”, “weird”, “bizarre” and “secretive” homosexual relationship in prison between the plaintiff Barry Watters and Larry Murphy, a notorious criminal who had been convicted of rape and attempted murder. Matthews J held that the plaintiff had a residual reputation which was damaged by the newspaper’s allegations. He therefore granted the plaintiff a declaratory order pursuant to section 28 of the 2009 Act (also here) that the article was defamatory, and he made a further order pursuant to section 33 of the 2009 Act (also here) prohibiting the newspaper from re-publishing the defamation. Nevertheless, the newspaper repeated the defamation: in an article alongside a photograph of Watters the newspaper had stated:
…We may have to apologise to this revolting pervert but will we mean it?
MCD PROMOTER Denis Desmond is pursuing Prince through the American courts to recover €2.2 million in damages which have not been paid.
Documents filed in the Central District of the Los Angeles Superior Court are seeking recognition of the High Court judgment given last year against Prince.
If judgment is granted, Mr Desmond will be able to target Prince’s assets, including his home, if he does not pay.
I’ve discussed the background to this claim here.
Air tax refund firm in the wars
AIRTAXREFUND.COM has had a turbulent start to this year.Ryanair has stepped up the legal pressure on the new business, which is offering to chase air tax refunds for passengers for a small fee.
On February 4th, Ryanair’s director of legal and regulatory Juliusz Komorek affairs, fired off two more letters to co-founder Brian Whelan threatening legal action. …
Whelan has been given until 5pm today [ie, Fri Feb 11, 2011] to respond. He told me the matter was with his legal advisers at William Fry. …
I’ve set out the background to this issue here.
A JUDGE has found philanthropist Niall Mellon was defamed by a daily newspaper in a report claiming he had sacked a personal assistant shortly before she was due to give birth.
Yesterday Judge Alison Lindsay at the Circuit Civil Court ordered that the publishers of the Irish Daily Mail , Associated Newspapers Ltd, publish a correction and apologise to Mr Mellon after finding he had been defamed in an article that appeared in March last year. The article reported a claim by Helen O’Connor that she had been dismissed after asking him for financial help.
The judge said the newspaper had “no defence” to the action brought by Mr Mellon, who claimed the article contained words that were untrue and inaccurate.
Mr Mellon (44), a property developer from Rathfarnham, Dublin, had brought proceedings under the 2009 Defamation Act arising out of the report claiming he had sacked Ms O’Connor only two weeks before she was due to give birth.
If you trespass on my land, and make a profit from that trespass, what should the measure of damages be? It is a very important question, but the answer is disputed, and it had not been directly discussed at Irish law, so far as I know, until it was recently addressed by McMahon J in Victory v Galhoy Inns [2010] IEHC 459 (16 December 2010).
Trespass is a civil wrong (a tort), and the aim of damages for such wrongs is to compensate the plaintiff for the loss caused by the wrong: to put the plaintiff “in the same position as he would have been in if he had not sustained the wrong for which he is now getting his compensation” (Livingstone v Rawyards Coal Co (1880) 5 App Cas 25, 39 (Lord Blackburn); Smith New Court Securities v Scrimgeour Vickers [1997] AC 254, [1996] UKHL 3 (21 November 1996); Carey v Independent Newspapers [2003] IEHC 67 (7 August 2003)). However, the law has recognised that where a defendant has made a profit from a civil wrong, the damages can be directed instead to stripping the profits from the defendant. For example, in Hickey v Roches Stores (High Court, unreported, 14 July 1976) (pdf) Finlay P held
…Where a wrongdoer has calculated and intended by his wrongdoing to achieve a gain or profit which he could not otherwise achieve and has in that way acted mala fide then irrespective of whether the form of his wrongdoing constitutes a tort or a breach of contract the Court should in assessing damages look not only to the loss suffered by the injured party but also to the profit or gain unjustly or wrongly obtained by the wrongdoer.
© cearta.ie 2025. Powered by WordPress
