This Next week, there are not one but two sessions in the Dublin Legal Workshop series.

First up: the evening stream of the Dublin Legal Workshop is meant largely as a forum for external speakers to share ideas in Trinity. In this stream, at update: 6.30pm (and not 6.00pm as earlier announced) next Tuesday evening, 3 April 2007, in Room 11 of the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin (map here), Andrea Martin, solicitor and media law specialist (who has already featured on this blog), will give a talk entitled:

“Right of Reply – a Workable Proposition for the Media?â€?

Second: the afternoon stream of the Dublin Legal Workshop is meant largely as a forum for work in progress by the postgraduate research students and academic staff of the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin. In this stream, at 1.00pm next Wednesday afternoon, 4 April 2007, in the Law School’s library, Des Ryan, a research student, tutor, and part-time lecturer in the Law School (pictured left), will present a paper entitled:

“Tort Law, Public Authorities, Rights and Wrongs�.

If you are interested, please do come along. They should each be enjoyable and informative presentations.

All families are happy in the same fashion,
and each family is unhappy in its own way.

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
in Anna Karenina (1875-1877)

Banks lend money; but they are averse to the risks of this lending, so they usually require security for the money they lend. One form of security is to get another, creditworthy, person to agree to pay the loan if the borrower fails to do so. This arrangement is called a suretyship, and the person who undertakes to pay if the borrower does not is called a surety.

Do sureties need protection from the borrowers or lenders? For example, if a husband and wife have interests in the family home, and the wife agrees to secure a loan to her husband against her interest in the family home, does a vulnerable wife need protection either from an overbearing husband or an unscrupulous bank here? Read the rest of this entry »