Eoin – Page 176 – cearta.ie

In his great poem ‘Sunday Morning‘, Louis MacNeice describes Sunday morning as ‘Fate’s great bazaar’. And tomorrow morning, Fate’s great bazaar will bring us political blogging on the television (which is marginally less silly than Irish dancing – or for that matter, blogging – on the radio). Sunday morning, 9am, is an unholy hour to be awake on a weekend morning, but if perchance you are, then you could do worse than to tune in to Sunday AM at 9am on BBC1 for a political blogging special (via Guido Fawkes and Ian Dale).

Cross-posted from Irish Election…

If voting changed anything …

10 February, 200710 February, 2007

| No Comments

| Blogging

… they’d make it illegal (so said Litunanian-American anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman wikiquote | wikipedia). So, before they do, head over to the Irish Blog Awards and vote for your favourite blogs in many and various categories, including: Best Blog, Post or Humorous Post, Best Photo Blog, Group Blog, or Newcomer, Best Arts and Culture, Political, Personal, Technology, Sport and Recreation, News, Business, Specialist, or Music, Blog, Best Videocast, Podcast and Podcaster, and my personal favourite, Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere. Knock yourself out.

While you’re there, vote for Lex Ferenda in Best Newcomer, and Best Specialist Blog, and for Irish Election in Best Blog, Best Group Blog, and Best News/Current Affairs Blog. More eagerly-awaited and controversial than the Oscars, the awards themselves will take place on March 3rd in the Alexander Hotel. Look out for the usual mix of prima donna nominees, over the top acceptance speeches from the winners, insincere congratulations from the losers, and terrible dress sense from everyone. I’m sure that the Hollywood gathering the previous week will be tame by comparison.…

Dublin Legal Workshop: Broadcasting Bill

9 February, 200716 January, 2009

| No Comments

| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Digital Rights, Media and Communications

As the regular reader (there is [only]or[at least] one, according to my stats counters) of this blog will know, I am interested in the slow progress of the Broadcasting Bill, 2006 through the Houses of the Oireachtas (Parliament). For that reason, I am greatly looking forward to the next lecture in the evening stream of the Dublin Legal Workshop. Next Tuesday, 13 February, David McMunn, Director of Government, Regulatory and Legal Affairs for TV3, will give a talk entitled

The Broadcasting Bill, 2006. The Tooth Fairy – Judge,
Jury and Executioner.

It will be held in Room 11 of the School of Law, House 39, Trinity College Dublin (a map of College with directions to the School of Law is available here), at 6pm. If you’re interested, please do come along. …

Privacy law in the UK

8 February, 20079 February, 2007

| 7 Comments

| Privacy

I recently argued here that, if the High Court in Sinnott v Carlow Nationalist refers the matter to the Supreme Court, that court should take the opportunity to clarify the tort of invasion of privacy in Irish law. It’s a mess that needs sorting. After listening to Prof Gavin Phillipson‘s paper on UK privacy law in the Dublin Legal Workshop last week, it seems to me that UK privacy law is also a mess that needs sorting, and the House of Lords (in its judicial capacity, it is the UK’s highest court) should take a similar opportunity to sort things out there.

I have been musing since Gavin’s presentation on two points which seemed to me to arise from it (that’s Gavin in the photo on the left, btw). …

For your consideration

7 February, 20078 February, 2007

| 2 Comments

| Contract

Over on Lex Ferenda, DaithÃ has an alarming-sounding post: Postgraduate diploma in Aisle Seven. But this is neither another of the many online fake degrees, nor yet Tesco moving into the education business, selling qualifications next to the chopped tomatoes and pasta. Rather, it is the news that points earned through Tescoâ€™s Clubcard loyalty scheme can now be applied to fees at the Open University. Leaving aside questions about the privacy implications of loyalty card schemes, the power of supermarkets in our society, or even the ubiquity of Tesco, there is a very interesting issue here from the perspective of the Law of Contract.

For there to be a contract, there must be a serious agreement about a price. …

Roll up, roll up!

5 February, 20077 February, 2007

| 1 Comment

| Blogging, Irish Law, Irish Society, Politics

DaithÃ (with a hat tip to Lessig) has come up with an excellent idea for this election year, and for our next government:

We know that a lot of interesting IP and IT law and policy issues … will make their way into new Cabinet workplans.

This week, Iâ€™m calling on interested parties (interested being those (bloggers or not) with an interest in the legal and policy elements of the Internet …) to join in. Each person will be responsible for one proposal, of her or his choice … to identify an existing law (â€?lawâ€? including whatever you want it to, and specifically including European directives, as a lot of the American issues are EU competence over here), and to suggest how it could be improved / amended / replaced / etc.

Brilliant idea. Wish I’d thought of it.…

Why do (should) legal academics blog?

4 February, 20075 February, 2007

| 7 Comments

| Blogging, Irish Law

Following on from the self-referential legal blogging conference and why do I blog? posts in the last few weeks, here’s some more navel gazing: why do (and/or should) legal academics blog? This one’s provoked by a thoughful interview by Jack Balkin which he reproduced on his blog Balkinization. He has been thinking about these issues for a while now, and this post has predicatably provoked many equally thoughtful replies, such as those here, here and here (and a good resource on the issue in general is here). Some of the comments in these posts resonated with me. …

The Role of the Supreme Court

3 February, 200716 January, 2009

| No Comments

| Irish Law, US Supreme Court

Interesting coincidence. At around the same time that Donncha O’Connell, Dean of the Faculty of Law, NUI Galway was this week welcoming Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court to Galway [she was in Trinity the following day] and objecting to single judgments by the Irish Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg’s boss, Chief Justice John Roberts, was telling law students in Northwestern University that his court should strive for precisely that, provoking a predictable storm of welcomes and worries.

These two speeches neatly encapsulate an important philosophical constitutional debate both in the US and in Ireland.…