Eoin – Page 33 – Cearta.ie

Judicial appointments, and academics – a footnote

Posted on 24 April, 201618 May, 2016 by Eoin

Lord Neuberger, President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom gave an address (pdf) to the International Council of Advocates at the World Bar Conference in Edinburgh recently. Given the occasion, Neuberger was mostly concerned with the role of advocates; but he did also mention the inter-relationship between bench and bar; and he made a very interesting observation about judicial diversity, in particular about the desirability of recruiting judges from academia or government.

Here are some extracts (emphasis added):

3. An honest, expert, respected, and independent judiciary is now generally accepted as being an essential ingredient of the rule of law, which is one of the two main constitutional pillars of an properly ethical and commercially successful society (the other pillar being democratic government). …

6. I believe that the system that it exists in the countries represented here today, Zimbabwe, Wales, South Africa, Scotland, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, Namibia, Ireland, Hong Kong, England or Australia, is one which we have every reason to feel proud of. Not only does each of us have a strong and independent judiciary and a strong and independent legal profession, but we each have a system which ensures that the two groups, judges and lawyers, understand each other.

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Restitution to the Executive and the recovery of unauthorised State payments – I – farmers overpaid from EU schemes

Posted on 19 April, 201611 May, 2016 by Eoin

The Times reported last week that the taxpayer has been hit with a €70m bill for overpaid farmers. Under various schemes, farmers are entitled to claim payments via the exchequer from the EU Commission based on the amount of land they own. From 2012, high-resolution aerial photography provided accurate measurements of farms; and it transpired that, between 2008 and 2014, paper maps had overstated the size of some farms, so that some farmers had been overpaid (see here | here | here). After protracted negotiations, the State repaid €68.9million to the EU Commission (see Department of Agriculture press release (pdf)), of which €4 million has been recovered from overpaid farmers. According to The Times, the Minister for Agriculture, Simon Coveney, “expressed his ‘clear preference’ that the repayments should be funded through the exchequer” rather than recovered from the overpaid farmers. A spokesman for the Department told the Times:

Due to the passage of time and the protracted process of opposition to a flat-rate correction with the commission, this cannot be collected from individual farmers.

There may be some factual difficulties in assessing who was overpaid and by how much, but there are no difficulties whatsoever with the legal principles underpinning the State’s claim to recover the overpayments from the overpaid farmers.…

Vote Zuckerberg No 1? Gatekeepers, intermediaries and Corporate Social Responsibility

Posted on 17 April, 201630 May, 2016 by Eoin

Facebook vote image, elements via https://pixabay.com/en/ballot-election-vote-1294935/ and https://www.facebook.com/facebook Some things I read today resonated with one another.

First, from The Signal and the Noise (The Economist Special Report on Technology and Politics; pdf; p6):

… online giants, such as Facebook and Google, … know much more about people than any official agency does and hold all this information in one virtual place. It may not be in their commercial interest to use that knowledge to influence political outcomes, as some people fear, but they certainly have the wherewithal. …

Second, from Gizmodo:

Facebook has declared it will never use its product to influence how people on the platform vote. Earlier today, Gizmodo reported that employees had asked Mark Zuckerberg to answer the question, “What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?” in an internal poll.

In a statement to the Hill and Business Insider, Facebook said:

Voting is a core value of democracy and we believe that supporting civic participation is an important contribution we can make to the community. We encourage any and all candidates, groups, and voters to use our platform to share their views on the election and debate the issues. We as a company are neutral — we have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote.

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Memory in a Digital Age: Collecting, Accessing and Forgetting

Posted on 12 April, 201630 April, 2020 by Eoin

This is Trinity Week in Trinity College Dublin. The cricket pitch is beginning to look green; the cherry blossom is beginning to come into bloom; and Front Square is beginning to fill up with tourists. Trinity Week commenced yesterday on Trinity Monday, when we celebrated the announcement of the new Honorary Fellows, Fellows, and Scholars of the College. This is followed by a week of events including symposia, lectures, roundtable discussions and many other events, all of which will be of interest to the general public as well as to members of College and academics from other institutions. This year, the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is hosting the programme of events for Trinity Week. The theme for the week is “Memory”, and the week long programme will include exciting events which demonstrate the key role memory plays in the teaching and research in the Faculty. There is more information here, the brochure may be downloaded here, and the events are live-tweeted here.

On Thursday next, 14 April, from 9:00am until 1:30pm, the School of Law (as one of the Schools in the Faculty) is co-hosting a half-day seminar on

Memory in a Digital Age: Collecting, Accessing and Forgetting.

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Monitoring media pluralism in Ireland

Posted on 12 April, 20161 November, 2017 by Eoin

Updated: 1 November 2017

Article 11(2) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (pdf) provides that

The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.

As a consequence, as part of its implementation of the Digital Single Market, the European Commission defends Media Freedom and Pluralism in a variety of ways. For example, the Media Pluralism Monitor is designed to identify potential risks to media pluralism in Member States. It is based in the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom in the Robert Schumann Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, Florence. The pilot programme was established in 2009. The monitor has been implemented twice, first in 2014 on 9 EU countries, and second in 2015 on the remaining 19 EU countries. [Update: In 2016, the CMPF implemented the monitor in all 28 EU Member States and in two candidates countries (Montenegro and Turkey).] Ireland was included in the 2015 monitor, in a chapter written by Dr Roderick Flynn of DCU.

The monitor assesses four key areas of media pluralism. The first relates to Basic Protection, which concerns

regulatory safeguards for freedom of expression and the right to information; the status of journalists, and the independence and effectiveness of the national regulatory bodies.

…

Overactive ATMs, overpayments, and theft

Posted on 7 April, 201620 August, 2019 by Eoin

In the case of overpayments by an ATM, erroneous overpayments can be recovered by the bank (whether on foot of the bank’s terms and conditions, or pursuant to a restitution claim to recover a mistaken payment), and so must be repaid by the customer. Worse, seeking and retaining the overpayments can amount to theft. As I have said on this site, a bank error in your favour is not a gift from God; an overactive atm is not santa, and the scrooge bank will have to be repaid; bank errors are not a licence to gamble; and keeping the proceeds of a bank error in your favour can amount to theft.

All of this is brought to mind by a story in this morning’s Irish Independent (also Sunday World and 98fm):

Man who withdrew thousands of euro from ATMs during Ulster Bank computer failure avoids jail

… Babatunde Fagbule (46) visited several ATMs around Dublin and Meath on June 22, 2012 and made thousands of euro in withdrawals. By the end of the day the account, which belonged to his wife, was overdrawn by €8,315. … The court heard Fagbule had no right to withdraw more money than was in the account as it did not have an overdraft facility.

…

Judicial appointments, and academics – again

Posted on 31 March, 201618 May, 2016 by Eoin

Approximately one month after both Adrian Hardiman of the Irish Supreme Court and Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court suddenly passed away, Thomas Cromwell of the Supreme Court of Canada has given notice to the Canadian Minister of Justice that he will retire from the bench effective 1 September 2016. On theCourt.ca, John Mastrangelo writes that “the newly-elected Canadian government will soon face a challenge of its own in replacing a Canadian Supreme Court titan”. One aspect of Mastrangelo’s assessment caught my eye:

Born in Kingston Ontario, the young Thomas Cromwell earned degrees in Music and in Law from Queens University, an ARCT Diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Music, and a Bachelor of Civil Law from Oxford University. After spending time teaching at both the University of Toronto and Dalhousie University, Justice Cromwell served as Executive Legal Officer to then-Chief Justice Antonio Lamer between 1992 and 1995, before going on to serve in the judiciary himself. In 1997, he was appointed by former Prime Minister Jean Chretien directly to the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal despite not having had any prior experience as a trial judge (although he had previously served as a labour arbitrator and adjudicator in Nova Scotia).

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Defamation Reform in Great Britain and Ireland: A Comparative Analysis

Posted on 30 March, 20163 October, 2023 by Eoin

All four jurisdictions in Great Britain and Ireland have engaged in reforming defamation law over the last decade. The Republic of Ireland and England and Wales have already enacted new Defamation Acts, while the Northern Irish and Scottish Law Commissions are currently working on reform proposals. Indeed, the Irish Law Reform Commission has recently been invited by the Attorney General to consider a very net issue relating to defamation law and court reporting.

Against this backdrop, the Private Law Discussion Group in the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, will host a public event on defamation law reform in Great Britain and Ireland, from 17:30 to 19:00 on Friday 1 April in Neill Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin (map).

The group is delighted to welcome Dr Eric Descheemaeker (pictured above left), of the School of Law, University of Edinburgh, who will examine selected provisions of the Irish Defamation Act 2009 (also here) against the wider background of defamation reform in the British Isles. The common substrate of these four systems makes it especially interesting to compare their approaches on a number of issues. Dr Eoin O’Dell, of the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, will then respond to the issues raised in Dr Descheemaeker’s analysis.…