Author: Eoin

Dr Eoin O'Dell is a Fellow and Associate Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin.

Solicitors, Plagiarism, and Fitness to Practise

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| Law, plagiarism, Universities

Legal Sopabox blog avatar.Part V of the Solicitors (Amendment) Act, 1994 (also here) governs qualifying for admission as a solicitor in Ireland. Amending section 24 of the Solicitors Act, 1954 (also here), section 40 of the 1994 Act provides that

a person shall not be admitted as a solicitor unless
…
(e) he has satisfied the Society [ie, the Law Society of Ireland] that he is a fit and proper person to be admitted as a solicitor.

In the Australian state of Victoria, the equivalent legislation [section 1.2.6 of the Legal Profession Act, 2004] requires that the person be “currently of good fame and character”. Moreover, in both Ireland and Vitoria, there is elaborate machinery to strike a solicitor off for alleged misconduct. I learn from The Legal Soapbox (an entertaining Australian blawg, and one of my favourites) that the Victoria provisions have recently featured in case which is a cautionary tale for all students wishing one day to be admitted to practice as solicitors. …

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Legal Education, again

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| Law, Legal Education, Universities

UCC Legal Education Symposium.





The Faculty of Law, University College Cork hosted the second annual Legal Education Symposium on Friday 7 December last (I blogged about it here and here). Now comes news that the video of the event has just been made available here. Last week, I mentioned that Daithí had pointed out (in a post I wished I’d written) that the UCC Law Faculty is very much to the forefront in online law matters, and making video of their events available online is just one example of their leadership in this important area.

Bonus link no 1: If you scroll to near the bottom of the video page, you will find an older video of me discussing the (benighted) Defamation Bill (not yet enacted, but on its way through the Seanad for the second time, and I hold out hope that the long wait will soon – well, soonish, but finally and eventually – be over!).

Bonus link no 2: There is an important debate right now in the US blogs about the importance of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Important contributions are here (most recent at the time of writing of this post), here (excellent roundup with links), here (a common sense contribution with which I mostly agree, for many of these reasons) and here & here (the posts that sparked this round of commentary).…

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Natural copyright?

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| Copyright

Copyright symbolIn Phonographic Performance Ltd v Cody [1998] 4 IR 504, 511, [1994] 2 ILRM 241, 247 (emphasis added), Keane J held that:

Section 60(4) of the Act of 1963 [ie, the Copyright Act, 1963; see now section 77(4) of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000] provides that no right in the nature of copyright “shall subsist otherwise than by virtue of this Act or of some other enactment in that behalf”. The right of the creator of literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work not to have his or her creation stolen or plagiarised is a right of private property within the meaning of Articles 40.3.2 and 43.1 of the Constitution, as is the similar right of a person who has employed his or her technical skills and/or capital in the sound recording of a musical work. As such, they can hardly be abolished in their entirety, although it was doubtless within the competence of the Oireachtas to regulate their exercise in the interests of the common good. In addition and even in the absence of any statutory machinery, it is the duty of the organs of the State, including the Courts, to ensure, as best they may, that these rights are protected from unjust attack, and in the case of injustice done, vindicated.

…

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The shape of things to come?

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| Law

Posted in Slaw, a view of the present state of the Supreme Court of Canada:

Top Court Truly Wired

by Simon Chester on January 21st, 2008

Simon reported from the Lexum Conference on Justice Bastarache’s speech on the Supreme Court of Canada’s technology plans.

Completely unofficially, here is a picture from last Wednesday, showing the extent of the court’s commitment – every place at the counsel table is wired, the central desk from which counsel addresses the court looks like a command centre. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Supreme Court of CanadaI didn’t have a chance to peek behind the judges’ area – I suspect that is permanently off-limit to mere mortals – but I suspect that the bench will be similarly wired. As the court moves to digital factums, counsel will need to be nimble with the mouse as well as the orator’s tongue.

When will we see similar technology in the (still unfortunately overworked) Irish Supreme Court? …

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Holocaust Memorial

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| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin via widipedia.The 2008 Holocaust Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Professor Christopher Browning, tonight (Monday, 21 January 2008) at 7:30pm, in the Edmund Burke Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin (map).

The subject will be the memory of Holocaust survivors:

Remembering Survival: Postwar Testimonies from the Starachowice Slave Labour Camps

Christopher R. Browning is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and internationally recognized as one of the top historians of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. His book on how ordinary men took part in mass killing in Nazi-occupied Poland is widely recognized as one of the most insightful studies of the perpetrators of genocide (Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Harper Collins, 1992 (Amazon)). More recently he has turned from the politics of the genocide to the perspective of survivor victims and the issue of memory. It is this that he will address in the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, which is an annual public event sponsored by the Department of History and the Herzog Centre for Jewish and Near Eastern Religion in Trinity College Dublin, and by the Holocaust Educational Trust of Ireland.…

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I wish I’d said that

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| General

Cover of book by Ned Sherrin, via Amazon.Departing from my usual fare of long original content, here are three links to things I wish I’d said, but someone better got there first:

First, Bernie Goldbach (aka Inside View, formerly Irish Eyes) Please Steal My Wifi

… I do not require passwords. I run no encryption protocols. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet. That includes two neighbours and the occasional car that parks across the road from my bay window to suck on my service. …

I agree with this philosophical position …

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Cue fanfare

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| General

Cover of … The sweetest moment comes at last – the waiting’s over,
In shock they stare and cue fanfare.
When Bobby Fischer‘s plane – plane plane – touches the ground –
Plane plane – he’ll take those Russian boys and play them out of town,
Playing for blood as grandmasters should. …


Prefab Sprout “Cue Fanfare” from Swoon (1984)
…

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Legislating Truth

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| Blasphemy, Freedom of Expression, Media and Communications, prior restraint

I am a politics junkie – I will watch party conferences and conventions, and enjoy the experiences! And I still remember a Fianna Fáil Árd Fhéis (national party conference) in which Charlie Haughey began a key section of his leader’s speech by asserting: “The truth, as we in Fianna Fáil see it, is …”. I don’t remember what he said after that, because I was so flabbergasted at the audacity of making truth contingent upon a political point of view. Of course, this was only a small thing compared to the flabbergasting audacity of other aspects of Haughey’s career, but the attitude of subordinating truth to political power is not unique to him or to Fianna Fáil. A particularly egregious example is provided by reports this morning that the author of a book on anti-Semitism in Poland may face court action. According to Derek Scally in the Irish Times (sub req’d):

The public prosecutor in Krakow has launched a preliminary investigation into a US historian who says post-war Poland continued where the Nazis left off in persecuting Jews. Jan Tomasz Gross [home page at Princeton | wikipedia] could, under a law passed by the Kaczynski government, face a prison sentence if found guilty of “accusing the Polish nation of participating in communist or Nazi crimes”.

…

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