According to this site, on Saturday, 26 October 1968, Ireland defeated Australia (Wallabies) 10-3 in a rugby (union) match held at Lansdowne Road, Dublin.
That date is also the birthday of Canadian actor Tom Cavanagh, best know for his role in the almost unbearably cute but still strangely addictive 2000-2004 tv series Ed (wikipedia entry | fan site); (it’s still running on TV3 – listing here). Sample line:
…I am a lawyer, I own a bowling alley. Two separate things.
George Orwell (left) wrote that when he was about sixteen, he “suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from PARADISE LOST,
So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure”.
(See his essay Why I Write, in which he concluded that writers typically write out of sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, or political impulse – if you’re a blogger, which one explains you? Do you recognise yourself in his conclusion that “[a]ll writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery”?).
Anyway, I was reminded of this when I recently came across John Wesley’s wonderful post on PickTheBrain about George Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing Style. Here are edited highlights: …
As I’ve already mentioned here and here, last Thursday, the University of Washington and Lee‘s branch of the American Constitution Society hosted a great Supreme Court Discussion Panel, Looking Back and Moving Forward, to recap the US Supreme Court’s 2006-2007 term and to preview its 2007-2008 term. This post looks at three more of the presentations, covering abortion, elections, detention, and sentencing.…
The Press Ombudsman and Press Council seem to be shaping up to try to hit the ground running in the new year. For example, Mark Hennessy in the Irish Times (sub req’d) recently reported that the Press Council will accept complaints from the public from 1 January 2008 about any articles published since 1 October last. However, Ronan McGreevy in the Irish Times (sub req’d) subsequently reported (also here) that meeting of the Press Council will take place next month, at which a decision will be taken as to when it will start taking complaints from the public, but the aim is still for 1 January.…
Perhaps the presentation below on Concurring Opinions is about Faccenda Chicken Ltd v Fowler [1987] Ch 117?
…Chicken, Chicken, Chicken…
Contracts professors have decided that this presentation is about Frigaliment Importing Co. v. B.N.S. International Sales Corp., 190 F.Supp. 116 (S.D.N.Y. 1960), a case in which Judge Friendly famously began his opinion with the sentence: “The issue is, what is chicken?” The full text of the paper presented below can be found here.
(HT: Pete Fitzgerald, Stetson Law School)
At the University of Washington and Lee‘s branch of the American Constitution Society event last Thursday, I heard Rodney Smolla (Dean of that university’s First Amendment issues: the speech rights of high school students (on which contrast here and here), and First Amendment law on obscenity.
High School Speech
(Insert High School Musical joke to taste here).
The first case he discussed was Morse v Frederick 551 US __ (2007) (Justice Talking (NPR) | oyez | wikipedia), in which the Supreme Court had to decide whether a banner bearing the slogan “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” at a school outing to watch the Olympic torch run through town (though not on school property) got First Amendment protection. Roberts CJ held that, because schools may take steps to safeguard students from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use, the school did not violate the First Amendment by confiscating the banner and suspending the student.
Dean Smolla argued that there were three key elements to Roberts CJ’s reasoning. …
A few weeks ago, noted US Constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky (wikipedia), currently Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Duke, was hired as the founding Dean of Donald Bren School of Law at the University of California, Irvine; then he was “unhired” (here’s Chemerinsky’s own take on that, from the LA Times); and quite quickly re-hired.
I’ve just recently discovered that Paul Caron on Tax Law Prof used this flap “to generate and publicize the best ideas about reforming legal education from some of the leading thinkers in the law school world”. He and Bill Henderson asked various legal luminaries to give 250-word answers to this question:
What is the single best idea for reforming legal education you would offer to Erwin Chemerinsky as he builds the law school at UC-Irvine?
They got forty responses, gathered together here, and well worth a read they are too (don’t just take my word for it; the Chronicle of Higher Education thinks so too (hat tip: Tax Prof Blog)).
I wonder whether any of those ideas will surface at the forthcoming (second annual) Legal Education Symposium hosted by UCC in December (already discussed here on this blog)?…
The BBC are reporting today on yet another death row battle in the United States: Alabama’s fierce death row battle:
If most politicians in Alabama had their way, Tommy Arthur would have been executed more than 20 years ago. … Alabama’s governor has made it clear he wants Arthur to die as soon as possible, and that the current furore over the chemicals used to deliver the ultimate punishment is an annoying distraction.
Although many death penalty abolitionists are viewing the US Supreme Court’s decision to review the constitutionality of the existing chemical cocktail with hope, the fact is that states like Alabama guard their rights very carefully – and few more so than the right to execution.
Last Thursday, I attended an event hosted by the University of Washington and Lee‘s branch of the American Constitution Society, looking at the US Supreme Court’s term just past and at the term to come. David Bruck, of that University’s Law School talked about death penalty cases (which he described as a US Supreme Court “staple, term after term”), including what the BBC story above referred to as “the current furore over the chemicals used to deliver the ultimate punishment”.…
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