TCD – Page 4 – cearta.ie

For too long, Irish universities have hoped that the many developments in graduate funding to develop a Fourth Level in the Irish university sector in recent years would trickle down to offset the ongoing cuts in third level undergraduate funding. It hasn’t happened. Moreover, it was never going to happen. In effect, funds were taken from the broad-based undergraduate sector, and eventually returned in part to highly targeted elements of the post-graduate sector. It is a short-sighted policy: if there is no support for the undergraduate sector, whence will the graduates come for the post-graduate sector? It follows, therefore, that a successful, generously funded, fourth level needs to be constructed upon an equally successful, and equally generously funded, third level sector. …

Holocaust Memorial

21 January, 200827 January, 2009

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| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops

The 2008 Holocaust Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Professor Christopher Browning, tonight (Monday, 21 January 2008) at 7:30pm, in the Edmund Burke Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin (map).

The subject will be the memory of Holocaust survivors:

Remembering Survival: Postwar Testimonies from the Starachowice Slave Labour Camps

Christopher R. Browning is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and internationally recognized as one of the top historians of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. His book on how ordinary men took part in mass killing in Nazi-occupied Poland is widely recognized as one of the most insightful studies of the perpetrators of genocide (Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Harper Collins, 1992 (Amazon)). More recently he has turned from the politics of the genocide to the perspective of survivor victims and the issue of memory. It is this that he will address in the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, which is an annual public event sponsored by the Department of History and the Herzog Centre for Jewish and Near Eastern Religion in Trinity College Dublin, and by the Holocaust Educational Trust of Ireland.…

Charity Premiere: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

15 January, 200816 January, 2009

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| Cinema, television and theatre, Irish Society

On Thursday 7 February 2008, Aois agus Eolais – the Centre for Ageing, Neuroscience and the Humanities will host a charity premiere of the extraordinary movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in aid of Stroke Research in the Adelaide and Meath Hospital Dublin, incorporating the National Childrenâ€™s Hospital, Tallaght (AMNCH). It will begin with a reception at 6.30pm in the Atrium (map), Trinity College Dublin, followed by the screening at 8.00pm, Irish Film Institute (map), Eustace Street, Dublin 2. Subscription is â‚¬50, and further information and inviations are available from Catherine Talbot at 01 414 2432 or Marian Hughes at 087 286 4527.

The movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (official site | imdb | wikipedia) is based on the book Le scaphandre et le papillon by Jean-Dominique Bauby (amazon | NYT review | wikipedia), in which Bauby recounts the effects of a catastrophic stroke and weeks of deep coma from which he surfaced into “locked-in syndrome“, mentally alert but deprived of movement and speech, leaving the blinking of his left eyelid as his only means of communication. Directed by Julian Schnabel, the movie based on the book is shot from Bauby’s perspective, offering us views of his memories and imagination and his struggle to communicate and come to terms with his condition.…

The Future of Irish Legal Education

10 December, 200710 February, 2009

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| Law, Legal Education, Universities

And so to my Alma Mater, University College Cork (UCC), where the Faculty of Law hosted the second annual Legal Education Symposium last Friday. This year’s event, organised by Dr Fidelma White and Mr Gerard Murphy and again generously sponsored by Dillon Eustace Solicitors, had a decidedly transatlantic flavo(u)r, with of course a good deal of Cork relish as well.

The venue was UCC’s handsome 19th century Aula Maxima (pictured above left), and the delegates were welcomed in a characteristically witty and incisive speech by Dermot Gleeson, SC (former Attorney General, current Chairman of the Governing Body of UCC, and quondam lecturer in the UCC Law Faculty). He shared with us some thoughts on the various-interlinkages between the academy, practice, and the bench. He said that the best superior court judge since independence was Seamus Henchy (something I have long also believed), in part because Gleeson likes the way Henchy wrote, which Gleeson speculated may be in part because Henchy was a law professor in UCD before he went to the bench. He concluded by expressing his skepiticism about the instant transferability the science model of PhDs to Irish law, a matter to which I will return below.…

Recent Developments in Media Law and Regulation

7 December, 200716 January, 2009

| 3 Comments

| Defamation, Freedom of Expression

The School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, will host a conference on the above theme on Thursday, 17 January 2008 next. Full details here. This conference offers an excellent opportunity for legal practitioners, journalists, editors and anyone with an interest in the Irish media to keep up to date with the many significant developments that have occurred in the last 12 months. Many of the questions to be discussed on the day have already featured on this blog, and the speakers will include my colleagues Dr Eoin Carolan and Dr Neville Cox, Prof John Horgan (the recently-appointed Press Ombudsman), solicitors Karyn Harty and Paula Mullooly, and barrister Luá¡n Ó Braonáin SC.…

TCD Lecture by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

9 November, 200716 January, 2009

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| Law

On Friday 23 November 2007, at 10.00am, the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, in association with the Department of Foreign Affairs, will host a guest lecture by Louise Arbour (former judge of the Supreme Court of Canada, former Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, and now UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; see CBC | wikipedia), entitled:

Responsibility to Protect as a Duty of Care in International Law and Practice

The lecture will take place in the Exam Hall (map here); all are welcome to attend; please RSVP.

The lecture will address the historical origins and development of the responsibility to protect norm, its fundamental differences from the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, the legal core of responsibility to protect and when and how the norm is engaged, the role that UN institutions can play in interpreting and applying the norm and mechanisms of cooperation available to the international community.

It promises to be a fascinating lecture, and I am greatly looking forward to it. It is no exaggeration to say that the international community has not dealt very well either with calls for or with cases of humanitarian intervention, especially over the last ten to fifteen years or so.…

Property and Empire: From Colonialism to Globalisation

2 November, 200716 January, 2009

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| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops

On Tuesday next, 6 November 2007 at 6pm, the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, will host a guest lecture by Prof Patrick McAuslan entitled:

Property and Empire: From Colonialism to Globalisation

Professor Patrick McAuslan, of the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, has worked throughout the developing world, including India, Vietnam, Jamaica, South Africa and Uganda, as a policy adviser to governments on land and environmental matters and as a drafter of new laws on land and natural resources. He studied law at Oxford and was a founding member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1961 to 1966 and of the Warwick School of Law. He was Professor of Public Law at LSE and Professor of Urban Management at UCL. He has wide-ranging research interests and is the author and co-author of several books and many articles, including Bringing the Law Back In: Essays on Land, Law and Development (Ashgate, 2003).

The lecture will take place in The Law School, Trinity College Dublin (map here); all are welcome to attend; please RSVP by 1pm on Monday, 5 November 2007 to Kelley McCabe.…

The Holocaust Memorial Lecture, 2007

18 October, 200727 January, 2009

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| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops

My colleagues in the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, the Herzog Centre for Jewish and Near Eastern Religion, Trinity College Dublin, and the Holocaust Educational Trust of Ireland (HETI) will host their annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture for 2007 on Thursday, 25 October 2007 at 7:30pm in the Emmet Theatre (Room 2037) of the Arts Building (map here), Trinity College Dublin; and all are welcome to attend.

The speaker will be Professor Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland (pictured left), and he will speak on the topic of

The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda in Germany and the Middle East during World War Two and the Holocaust

Jeffrey Herf is Professor of History at the University of Maryland and currently a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He has published extensively on the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and on West and East Germany during the Cold War; and his most recent book, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006) (cover pictured left) examines the Nazi regime’s anti-semitism and its public defense of a policy of “exterminating” Europe’s Jews.

Further details are available from Prof John Horne, Department of History, TCD; Dr Zuleika Rodgers, Herzog Centre, TCD; and Lynn Jackson, (HETI).…