In a sparkling cover story in this week’s Times Higher Education (cover left), Tom Palaima tells of the passion that drove him to teach Classics and how it is at odds with the “educational shopping mall’ vision of officialdom. His experience has universal relevance, as Irish public policy on state-funded higher education is “learning” from the US practice, rather than recognising it for the mistake it is, as cogently argued by Palaima (article | pdf | html) …
Author: Eoin
Dr Eoin O'Dell is a Fellow and Associate Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin.
Is DC v Heller a Roe v Wade for our times?
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.
In 1972, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Roe v Wade 410 US 113 (1973) (Findlaw | Justicia | Oyez | wikipedia), which held the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution protects the (penumbral) right to privacy, including a woman’s qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. It was a controversial decision which demonstrated that the Court was at the vanguard of the dominant public political mood. The Court was sharply divided; the case was decided on the basis of contestable constitutional theory; and it has subsequently given rise to a huge amount of analysis and scholarship, as well as much partisan social commentary and political scheming.
In 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States decided US v Heller 554 US __ (2008) (official pdf | Findlaw report) (Balkinization | Mike O’Shea on Concurring Opinions | NRA | Posner | ScotusWiki | Volokh | Wikipedia), which held that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.…
Ten Things Lawyers Should Know About Internet Research
kc claffy, of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center of the University of California, San Diego has a blog post (hat tip: David) under the above heading:
Last year kc claffy was invited to give a 15-minute vignette (at the Supernova 2007 conference) on the challenge of getting empirical data to inform telecom policy. Following the conference, she was invited to attend a meeting in March 2008 hosted by Google and Stanford Law School — Legal Futures — to convey the most important data points she knew about the Internet to lawyers thinking about how to update legal frameworks to best accommodate information technologies in the 21st century. With a couple months of more thought, kc has come up with a comprehensive list of the top ten most important things lawyers need to understand about the Internet.
It is fascinating to have the techie view on research relating to the internet written from that perspective but with an eye to a legal (and policy) readership. She has provided ten link-rich, punchy and informative posts which every lawyer and policy-maker should read. …
Banning Books
Writing today in his Weird Cases column in TimesOnline (update: the outcome of a similar case is here), Gary Slapper (left) hits the nail on the head:
Historically, there has been a serious problem for those who try to use the law to ban books: their action is commonly counter-productive. Nothing so effectively enlarges a book’s readership as a censor trying to stop people from reading it.
It reminds me that the American Library Association (ALA) promotes Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read at the end of September each year:
…BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.
Is the Internet turning contract law on its head?
According to Richard Warner, in “Turned on its Head?: Norms, Freedom, and Acceptable Terms in Internet Contracting”, a paper recently made available on SSRN and BePress, many commentators contend that it is, though in his view it is not. The issue is basically very simple: either the current law of contract is capable of regulating internet contracts because they are after all still contracts, or the current law of contract is not capable of regulating internet contracts because the internet is too different from its current reach that it cannot cover internet contracts. It depends on whether you stress the “internet” element, or the “contract” element. I stress “contract”, and take the view that the current law can easily accommodate internet contracts, for the simplistic reason that a contract is still a contract. …
Vouching for Consumers
The Consumer Protection Act, 2007 (also here), though it is the latest in a long line of piecemeal legislative forays into the area, nevertheless bids fair to provide substantial protection for consumers, provided both that the National Consumer Agency established under it is vigilant and active in that goal, and that it is allowed to be (for example, it may not survive in its current form calls (for example, by Fine Gael) for its abolition as part of the government’s cost-cutting desire to merge various statutory agencies). One important step was taken yesterday with the publication of draft guidelines for the retail sector. …
Dell’s Mistake
It is the error everyone online dreams about – a full-price item for practically nothing; and it happened, in Chile. For those who remember the case of the mistaken flights last April, Andres Guadamuz tells us about a massive pricing error made by Dell on its Latin American website last June:
…… One of Dell’s main features is the possibility of configuring computers by adding, removing or upgrading components. On 27 June 2008, this feature went wrong, and started subtracting money for an upgrade instead of adding it. … Apparently, some people in Chile found the mistake, and this being the Web 2.0 universe, left messages in Facebook and blogs advertising the gaffe, .. This resulted in an astounding 66 … times increase in sales in that day for Chile, and apparently thousands attempted to get the exploit (unofficially, 15 thousand laptops!). Needless to say, Dell did not fulfil the orders, and offered the affected customers a 15% discount in future sells. …
Something must be done – III
The two earlier posts (here and here) to which this is the third related to harmful use of the internet, especially relating to children; while another series of posts (here, here and here) related to the regulation of video games. In the same vein (but coming to it late – apologies) is a report published last month by the UK’s House of Commons Select Committee on Culture Media and Sport, entitled Harmful content on the Internet and in video games. There is a balanced comment by Simon Walden in guardian blogs; see also BBC | OUT-Law | The Register | Times Online). Commenting on the Report, Light Blue Touchpaper says:
…You will discern a certain amount of enthusiasm for blocking, and for a “something must be done” approach. However, in coming to their conclusions, they do not, in my view, seem to have listened too hard to the evidence, or sought out expertise elsewhere in the world …