Author: Eoin
Dr Eoin O'Dell is a Fellow and Associate Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin.
Why should “Anon.” get all the best lines? Reflections on anonymous political speech
Given that I have strongly defended anonymous speech on this blog (here and here), Sarah Hinchliff Pearons‘s blogpost Accountability and Anonymity: Rethinking the Value of Anonymous Speech caught my eye. Her basic point is
… not to argue that we should not try to prevent lawsuits designed to stifle free speech. … Instead, I am arguing that in designing solutions to this problem, we must be careful not to place a premium on anonymous speech. While there are certainly circumstances under which anonymity is necessary, those situations are and should be limited. There is a reason why journalists are strongly discouraged from quoting anonymous sources – it prevents accountability. As we transition into an environment where more people than ever have the ability to communicate their ideas and opinions, it is more important than ever that we encourage accountability in the marketplace of ideas. Incentivizing anonymity is certainly not the way to do that.
Similar points and cases are discussed here here, here and here.
On the other hand, but there are times when speech is more important than accountability. Indeed, it is the very fact of the lack of accountability provided by anonymity that can make it a necessary means of dissenting political expression.…
Bentham and judicial retirement
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) (left) was a utilitarian philosopher, whose radical ideas on education inspired those who founded University College London. Nowadays, the Bentham Association (formerly the Bentham Club) is the Alumni Association for UCL’s lawyers, and it annually hosts a Presidential Address from an invited senior lawyer. This year’s address was given by Lord Pannick QC on the topic:
“Better that a horse should have a voice in that House [of Lords], than that a judge should” (Jeremy Bentham).
Replacing the Law Lords by a Supreme Court
It broadly concerned the implications of the removal of the final court of appeal from parliament, and can be heard online here. It covers a wide range of very interesting material, and is very well worth listening to. There’s no text yet online, but one aspect of it appears in Pannick’s column in today’s Times, taking the field on an issue I’ve looked at already on this blog (here and here); some extracts:
…Seventy is far too early for a supreme court judge to retire . . .
… The argument for a retirement age of 75 for all supreme court justices is very simple. Those appointed are the cream of the judiciary.
Cowengate and Freedom of Expression
No image, to represent the attempt to censor the Cowen caricatures
Suzy must get the prize for popularising the best political coinage of the day, for – so far as I can see – it is she who has run with the name “Cowengate” for the sturm und drang surrounding satirical portraits of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Brian Cowen. In a piece of guerrilla artistry as ingenious as the coinage Suzy has popularised, caricatures of Mr Cowen were anonymously hung on the walls of the National Gallery of Ireland and the Royal Hibernian Academy. Once they were discovered, they were removed, but not before they had garnered sufficient publicity for RTÉ (Raidio Telefís Éireann, the national state broadcaster) to broadcast a story about them on the flagship 9:00pm television news programme.
It has been the occasion for lots of bad puns and some embarrassment on the part of the Taoiseach, the Gallery and the Academy, but in the ordinary course of things, the story should have blown over after about 48hours. However, things then took two turns for the worse. First, RTÉ apologised to Mr Cowen and his family or for any disrespect shown to the office of Taoiseach by their broadcast.…
Cowengate: Pictures at an exhibition
- Ravel‘s orchestration of Mussorgksy‘s Pictures at an Exhibition, performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen at the BBC Proms in August 2006
This post is an addendum to Cowengate and Freedom of Expression (above). In the original version of that post, I had a paragraph of links to other coverage. Like Topsy, that paragraph growed and growed, so I’ve taken the list of links out of that post and put them here.…
Why are legislators so loath to repeal criminal libel provisions?
Article XIX, the Global Campaign for Freedom of Expression, is an international human rights organisation which defends and promotes freedom of expression and access to information worldwide. Defamation is one of the Global Issues on which they focus. Indeed, their 2000 Defining Defamation report (pdf) seeks to set out an appropriate balance between the human right to freedom of expression and the need to protect individual reputations. Principle 4 of this document, concerning criminal defamation, provides
(a) All criminal defamation laws should be abolished and replaced, where necessary, with appropriate civil defamation laws. Steps should be taken, in those States which still have criminal defamation laws in place, to progressively implement this Principle.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, they have this week published an overview of worldwide defamation trends, which they have enlivened with interactive maps of applicable legislation and punishments. They simply record that, for both Ireland and the UK, there are civil and criminal sanctions for defamation. But, in a parallel development, they have lobbied (letter | press release (both pdfs)) the UK government to accept an amendment of the Coroners and Justice Bill 2008 put down by Dr Evan Harris, MP which would abolish criminal libel in the UK.…
International and European Perspectives in Legal Education
The theme of the afternoon plenary session of the third Legal Education Symposium was on
International and European Perspectives in Legal Education
As if she didn’t have enough to do as one of the organisers, this session was chaired by Prof Blanaid Clarke, and the session examined the ongoing the Bologna Process, which aims to create a common European Higher Education Area (to which her co-organiser referred in the first plenary session this morning).
The first speaker was Dr Attracta Halpin, Registrar of the National University of Ireland on the topic of European Higher Education post-Bologna 1999: Napoleonic tendencies?, discussing how much standardisation is likely to be achieved by 2020 and how much could be considered desirable. She gave a whistle-stop tour of what the Bologna process is all about, where it came from, where it is now, and where it is going. It was built on the concept of student and teacher mobility, and comparability of degree programmes. The second speaker was Prof Frans Vanistendael of the Centre for a Common Law of Europe at the Katholieje Universiteit Leuven on the topic of Ten Years of Bachelor – Master Reform in Legal Education, and in effect, he looked at Bologna in practice in law schools.…
Developing legal education (including Laptops in class, again!)
As with the first set of parallel sessions, the second set of parallel sessions in the third Legal Education Symposium also covered a diverse range of interesting topics, including experiential learning, web 2.0 and teaching law in a global context. …
© cearta.ie 2025. Powered by WordPress