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Image: One astronaut to another, as they look at a monolith on a bleak lunar landscape.
Caption: Well, I’ll be darned, it does have the Apple logo on it!
Bonus link: Oxford Dictionary’s; Waitor required, fluent in English; and Ladie’s powder room; blooper photos via Turner Ink.
Further to my earlier post about last week’s Current Legal Problem lecture on
Spies Like Us? Frank Snepp and George Blake: Freedom of Speech and Restitutionary Remedies
the paper is now available here, via Scrib’d. It’s a good remedy for insomnia. All comments gratefully received.
It all began innocently enough: just before Christmas, Sunday Times journalist John Burns wrote a piece lamenting the shortcomings of blogging in Ireland. Leading bloggers naturally begged to differ. A month later, the spat was picked up by Trevor Butterworth writing on Forbes.com, who noted that “it’s hard to think of a free country more suited to blogging than Ireland”. By the same token, it’s at least as hard to think of a country more given to litigation; and the point was illustrated by a story retailed almost en passant in Butterworth’s piece:
As one journalist told me, Ireland’s media is currently abuzz over a “confidential” legal settlement against a blogger, who allegedly had to pay almost $140,000 in damages for a libelous post, seen by few, swiftly purged from the site, and readily apologized for.
This was intriguing. By the end of the week, John Burns in the Sunday Times had the full story:
A blogger has agreed a €100,000 settlement after libelling Niall Ó Donnchú, a senior civil servant, and his girlfriend Laura Barnes. It is the first time in Ireland that defamatory material on a blog has resulted in a pay-out. … In December 1, 2006, a blogger who styles himself as Ardmayle posted a comment about the couple … Following a legal complaint, he took down the blog and in February 2007 he posted an apology which had been supplied by Ó Donnchú’s and Barnes’ lawyer … However, the pair subsequently issued separate proceedings. It is understood that the €100,000 settlement was agreed shortly before the case was due before the High Court.
Indeed, there had been quite a detailed report at the time in the Sunday Independent; and in the last week, many blogs have pored over the story.
There’s nothing new in online defamation; the same basic legal principles apply online as they do offline; the medium may change, but the legal consequences of the message remain the same. (more…)
Over sixty years ago, the Faculty of Laws at University College London established the Current Legal Problems lecture series and accompanying annual volume as a major reference point for a broad range of legal scholarship opinion, theory, methodology, and subject matter, with an emphasis upon contemporary developments of law. The lectures are held at the Faculty of Law, Bentham House, Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1 from 6-7pm; they are open to the public and free of charge. This week‘s current legal issue is:
Spies Like Us? Frank Snepp and George Blake: Freedom of Speech and Restitutionary Remedies
“Espionage is a serious business” sang a moderately famous Irish pop singer of the 1980s. And so it is. It can be even more of a business when former spies seek to publish their memoirs, and things can get very serious indeed if they fail to seek the clearance of their former spymasters in advance. The decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in Snepp v US 444 US 507 (1980) and of the House of Lords in AG v Blake [2001] 1 AC 268; [2000] UKHL 45 (27 July 2000) make a fascinating pair of cases in which former spies (unsuccessfully) argued that a restitutionary remedy against uncleared publication of their memoirs infringed their speech rights.
The paper will seek to do three things. First, it will present a thorough analysis of the stories behind the decisions. How the opinion for the Court in Snepp evolved is a fascinating tale in its own right; so too are many elements of the Blake saga, not least the question of where the Snepp-like remedy in that case actually came from. So, the paper will begin with these stories, tales and sagas.
Second, it will look at the legitimacy of the restitutionary remedies in the cases in their own terms, and to suggest in particular that whilst there may be some legitimacy to the remedy announced in Blake, there is none for that announced in Snepp. Working out quite why this was so will help to clarify two difficult areas in the law of restitution: how, if at all, the law of restitution can justify awarding restitutionary damages for breach of contract, and proprietary remedies generally.
Third, it will measure the remedies awarded in Blake and Snepp against applicable speech standards (the First Amendment to the US Constitution and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, respectively), and to suggest in particular that the speech analyses in both cases were sadly lacking. Working out quite why this was so will help to clarify a difficult area of free speech law: how, if at all, common law and equitable doctrines and remedies can be made subject to constitutional speech standards.
Last week, Peter Sutherland gave a speech about the Irish university sector. It generated quite a lot of controversy at the time, and an edited version appears in yesterday’s Sunday Times. Unfortunately, the speech has rather overshadowed the occasion; this is a pity, since it was the launch of the Undergraduate Awards of Ireland and Northern Ireland 2010. This is the second year of the initiative; the IUA website has information about the last year’s winners as well as about this year’s competition. Submissions from undergraduates in the form of essays or projects can be entered into one of 26 categories. The first round is especially for final and penultimate year students together with part-time students who have secured at least 1/3 of credits necessary to graduate, and their deadline is 12 March 2010, so it’s approaching rather quickly. According to the criteria on the website, “your submission should represent the highest standard of intellectual and scholarly achievement in your chosen field … [and it] should embody a piece of independent and original work together with a clear identification of its aims and objectives”. So, no pressure then.