International Law

Vicarious libaility in the Supreme Court

Posted on January 19, 2009
Law reports from today’s Irish Times: O?Keeffe v Hickey [2008] IESC 72 Supreme Court, Judgments were delivered on December 19th, 2008 by Fennelly J (Murray CJ and Denham J concurring) and Hardiman J; Geoghegan J dissenting. Fennelly J Minister not liable for abuse by principal: There was no employment relationship between school principal Mr Hickey and the second-named [...

Legalese

Posted on January 17, 2009
From the New Yorker, via Slaw:

University fees are looking inevitable

Posted on January 16, 2009
The question of the return of university fees has been a concern of this blog for some time (see, eg, here, here, here). Via the invaluable Ninth Level Ireland, I learn of three stories this morning on the issue. Cumulatively, they seem to suggest that university fees are looking inevitable (which, I suspect, means that [...

Holocaust Memorial, 2009

Posted on January 15, 2009
The national Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration takes place on the Sunday nearest to 27 January every year (that is the anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Berkenau, and has been designated as Holocaust Memorial Day by the UN General Assembly)...

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Contract law and the slave trade

Posted on January 14, 2009
Nate Oman, on Concurring Opinions, writes that he has just finished Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings: Britain, Slaves, and the American Revolution (cover left) (Harper Collins, 2007). He is not sparing in his praise for the book, and then comments: As a contract geek, however, the most fascinating part of the book was the story of The [...

Journalists, sources, bloggers, privilege

Posted on January 13, 2009
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers. Mahatma Ghandi [source] With pending decisions relating to the protection of journalists’ sources in the Supreme Courts in Ireland and Canada, to say nothing of a new movie inspired by the travails of Judith Miller (pictured above left), a student note in the current Columbia Law Review (December 2008, [...

Contract, planning, PIAB

Posted on January 12, 2009
Law reports from today’s Irish Times: Contract based on undermining planning code cannot be enforced Kelly -v- Simpson: High Court. Judgment delivered by Mr Justice Charleton on December 1st, 2008 A contract based on a price that would not have been achieved but for representations designed to undermine the planning code should not be enforced...

Email disclaimers

Posted on January 11, 2009
From John Naughton’s column in today’s Observer By reading this, you agree to stop adding useless disclaimers … consider the curious legalese that is increasingly appended at the foot of emails dispatched from corporate email servers...

On university research

Posted on January 11, 2009
The way to get people to build a ship is not to teach them carpentry, assign them tasks, and give them schedules to meet; but to inspire them to long for the infinite immensity of the sea. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Popeye is out of copyright

Posted on January 10, 2009
Not only are early incarnations of Mickey Mouse no longer covered by copyright, but as of 1 January last, neither is Popeye (King Features page | Popeye.com | wikipedia), at least in the EU. According to The Times: Popeye the Sailor copyright free 70 years after Elzie Segar’s death ?I yam what I yam,? declared Popeye...

Quick question for privacy lawyers

Posted on January 09, 2009
If this had happened in Ireland, would the photos in this story (hat tip: Piste Off: Man Left Dangling With Full ?Northern Exposure? at Ski Resort) be actionable having regard to Sinnott v Carlow Nationalist (discussed here, here, here, here and here), and if so, should they be?

A cautionary tale

Posted on January 09, 2009
There may - controversially - be no duty to rescue at common law (see, eg, Alan Calnan (SSRN), David Hyman (pdf)), but the emergency can beget the man (Wagner v International Railway 232 NY 176 (1926) (Cardozo J)), even in New York. However, although danger may very well invite rescue (Wagner (Cardozo J) again), nevertheless, [...

Justice in the Media

Posted on January 08, 2009
It’s an old story by now, but I missed it at the time, and I stumbled upon it today. It begins with a worthy event, the Law Society of Ireland’s Justice Media Awards, established to give national recognition to legal journalism in various categories...

Laptops in class

Posted on January 08, 2009
In the Law School in Trinity, the proportion of my students using laptops in class has increased year by year, though they have not yet reached the levels attained in US law schools, where the vast majority of students have laptops in class. Whether this is too much of a good thing, however, is now [...

ESB, Xafinity, Madoff: Restitution in the news!

Posted on January 07, 2009
In yesterday’s Irish Times, I noticed the following story: ESB to pay rebates on 100,000 overcharged bills The ESB says the payment of rebates to about 100,000 of its customers who were overcharged on estimated bills will be completed by the end of next month...

Privacy in a private place: nude people have rights too

Posted on January 07, 2009
In Atherton v DPP [2006] 1 IR 245, [2005] IEHC 429 (21 December 2005) Peart J held that a video recording of a hedge visible from the public road - and thus of the accused causing criminal damage to the hedge - did not constitute an unconstitutional invasion of the accused’s right to privacy...

Stop motion animation, as it ought to be!

Posted on January 06, 2009

Speak for yourself, Brian

Posted on January 06, 2009
I’m all for freedom of speech, but until there is a realistic possibility of having to decide about this issue, my good friend Brian Lucey is on his own. Maman Poulet reports Image via Wikipedia Academics and pay cuts Associate Professor of Finance at TCD, Dr...

Student vs. University

Posted on January 05, 2009
You know how it goes at this time of the year - there are lists, lots of them, both of the best/worst of the year that is past and of resolutions and predictions for the year that is coming. I don’t usually go in for either, but one of those lists directed me to such [...

Mark Twain exercises the Privilege of the Grave

Posted on December 29, 2008
In an article written in 1905 but published for the first time in the most recent New Yorker, Mark Twain (left) exercises the privilege of the grave: that of the expression that is really free. In his view, although we may in theory have the right to free speech, nevertheless, in practice, prudence and social [...

A Christmas Contract Carol

Posted on December 23, 2008
It is an interesting phenomenon to observe a person’s name becoming a generic description. Take, for example, Shylock, who features in an earlier post on this blog. The name, with a lower-case initial, is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an extortionate usurer … an abusive term for a moneylender”...

It could be you?

Posted on December 22, 2008
Be careful what you wish for. Many of us hope to win the national lottery; but for the members of a Mayo lotto syndicate, winning the ?1,577,578 jackpot on 6 January 2001 did not bring the kind of positive changes they would have wished for. Four members collected the winnings; but a fifth man claimed [...

Shylock?s appeal: illegal contracts, specific performance and damages

Posted on December 21, 2008
I learn from this week’s New Yorker (cover, left) that the Cardozo School of Law of New York’s Yeshiva University that Shylock was finally able to appeal the judgment rendered against him in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (advance notice | poster (pdf) | YU news story | photos)...

Normal service is being resumed: religious and political advertising bans

Posted on December 19, 2008
Regular readers of this blog will know that section 20(4) of the Broadcasting Authority Act, 1960 (also here) and section 10(3) of the Radio and Television Act, 1988 (also here) as amended by section 65 of the Broadcasting Act, 2001 (also here) prohibit broadcast advertising in Ireland directed to any religious or political end (see [...

Judicial Wigs and Gowns

Posted on October 07, 2008
I wrote a little while ago about plans for most civil judges in England and Wales to cease wearing wigs, wing collars and bands, and to wear radically simplifed judicial gowns. The change was to come into effect from 1 January 2008, but it was postponed until 1 October because because an insufficient number of [...

UCD Legal Research Conference 2008: ?Legal Processes Beyond the State?

Posted on October 06, 2008
The postgraduate students in the School of Law at University College Dublin will host their third annual Legal Research Conference for postgraduates on 5-6 December 2008. The goal of the conference is to provide a forum for legal researchers at every level of postgraduate study to get together to discuss their research...

The first Monday in October

Posted on October 06, 2008
NPR CNN New York Times here and here Washington Post here and here. Back row (l to r): Stephen Breyer, Clarence Thomas (is it significant that he’s looking to his right?), Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito. Front Row (l to r): Anthony Kennedy, John Paul Stevens (is it significant that he’s looking a little uneasy?), Chief Justice John Roberts, [...

The public library

Posted on October 06, 2008
I love libraries - from the wonder that is the New York Public Library through the workaday necessity of my university’s very fine library to the welcome of the local lending library - so the following story in the Irish Times caught my eye: At the library Few State services provide greater customer satisfaction than the public [...

NUI Maynooth vs TCD at the top of the Sunday Times university rankings

Posted on September 29, 2008
There are lots of university league tables out there; and the University of Edinburgh maintains an excellent page assessing these various leagues and rankings. For example, Times Higher Education (rankings), Newsweek (pdf), Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Wuhan University and all produce annual tables of universities worldwide...

Journalists? Sources - Lessons from Canada?

Posted on September 28, 2008
Not only will the Irish Supreme Court have the opportunity on the appeal in Mahon v Keena [2007] IEHC 348 (23 October 2007) (discussed here and here by Daithí) to discuss the constitutional protections, if any, for journalists’ sources, but I learn from The Court that the Supreme Court of Canada will also have a [...

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