Author: Eoin

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

Shrek and the Law of Contract

| 5 Comments
| Cinema, television and theatre, Contract, General

Faustian bargains are at the heart of Shrek Forever After, the final chapter in the Shrek franchise, and those bargains raise interesting questions for the law of contract (even as the marketing of the film has raised others).

Like Australia (and in many ways even more than the obvious Paper Chase) Shrek Forever After is really A Movie About Contract Law!

Warning: plot spoilers When the movie begins, our hero, Shrek, is suffering a classic mid-life crisis; he is dissatisfied with married life, and pining for the old days, when he was a terrifying ogre rather than a domesticated tourist attraction. Rumpelstiltskin, the evil and manipulative magic deal-maker, offers Shrek the opportunity to spend a day as a real ogre again, in return for another day from Shrek’s childhood. The YouTube clip at the top left is the scene in which Rumpelstiltskin cajoles Shrek into agreeing. Having signed on the dotted line, Shrek is transported into an alternate reality. At first, he enjoys being fearsome one again. But the catch – and there’s always a catch – is that the day Rumpelstiltskin takes is the day of Shrek’s birth. This means that Shrek was not there to rescue Princess Fiona in the first movie; and her desperate parents, King Harold and Queen Lillian, turned to Rumpelstiltskin, and signed over the kingdom of Far Far Away to him in return for having all of their problems disappear.…

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The litigious Prince

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| General

From one of my favourite fun blogs, Being Five, a cartoon strip called The Artist:

Being Five is was a comic strip about a kid named Georgie who blogs using voice recognition software (since he can’t read or write yet). In the first panel above, his friend Vince is visiting, and Georgie introduces introduces him as the best artist in kindergarten.
In the second panel, Vince says that he wants to be called Picasso in future.
In the third panel, Georgie says: “Ok, here’s a picture by the Artist formerly known as Vince”.

The notoriously litigious artist now once again known as Prince [before his sad demise] has of late had been on the receiving end of an action for breach of contract in Ireland. …

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When a corrupt enrichment is not necessarily unjust

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| Restitution

CAB image, via CAB siteMy attention was drawn today to the fascinating decision of Feeney J in Criminal Assets Bureau v J W P L [2007] IEHC 177 (24 May 2007), in which the nature of an action for restitution of unjust enrichment was discussed. The basic question was whether the common law action in unjust enrichment was analogous to a statutory action taken by the the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) to confiscate a defendant’s “corrupt enrichment”. In the event, Feeney J held that since any enrichment of the defendant would not usually (or at all) be at the expense of the plaintiff, the common law claim to restitution of an unjust enrichment would not be made out where the statutory action to recover a corrupt enrichment would be, the claims were not analogous with one another. In which case, it would probably have been better to have avoided the issue in the first place by describing the statutory action in different terms, perhaps by using a simpler synonym for “enrichment” such as “gain” – after all, the aim of the proceeds of crime legislation is to get at criminals’ ill-gotten gains.…

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Restitution in EU law

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| ECJ, Restitution

From the excellent ECJblog, I discover a fascinating case about the principles of restitution in EU law (emphasis added):

Case C-470/08, Kornelis van Dijk v Kampen

Kampen towerSince 1982, Mr van Dijk had leased from the Dutch Municipality of Kampen (pictured right) a number of parcels of agricultural land … The lease between the two parties did not contain any clauses relating to the income supported scheme or payment entitlements.

For a number of years Mr van Dijk had received … [various EU] compensatory payments … A dispute arose between Mr van Dijk and the Gemeente Kampen regarding the nature and the extent of the obligations under the lease. The referring court essentially asked whether Community law required a lessee, on the expiry of the lease, to deliver to the lessor the leased land along with the payment entitlements accumulated thereon or relating thereto, or to pay him compensation.

The Court held that … payment entitlements remained with the lessee on the expiry of the lease … [the relevant schemes] did not contain any obligation on farmers who had leased land to transfer their payment entitlements to the lessor on the expiry of the lease.

The Court held that, in accordance with the principles common to the laws of the Member States, the right to restitution from the person enriched was conditional upon there being no valid legal basis for the enrichment at issue (Case C-47/07 P Masdar (UK) v Commission [2008]).

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Do libel laws chill scientific debate?

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| Defamation, Defamation Act 2009, Libel tourism, libel tourism

Keep libel out of science logo, via their websiteA few weeks ago, the Science Gallery in TCD hosted a fascinating event on the chilling impact of the law of libel on scientific debate. Chaired by Myles Dungan, the speakers were Simon Singh, who successfully defended a two year libel battle with the British Chiropractic Association, his lawyer Robert Dougans, cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst who is currently being sued for libel in the biggest ongoing medical libel case, and his lawyer Mark Lewis. A video of the event is now up on YouTube.

The cases against Singh and Wilmshurst are English, but, as an article in today’s Irish Times shows, Irish law is to the same effect: …

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Conference on Restitution of Overpaid Tax – only one week left to register

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| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Restitution

I wrote a little while ago about a conference on Restitution of Overpaid Tax, which will be held in Merton College Oxford on the weekend of Friday 9 and Saturday 10 July 2010. Advance copies of the papers for the conference are being published on the new papers page as they become available. The page is password-protected; and delegates who have registered for the conference will be supplied with a password.

Registration for the conference will close on Thursday 24 June 2010 at 5:00pm. If you are interested in attending, please register before then.…

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The Irish Times goes to Strasbourg

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| ECHR, Freedom of Expression, Journalists' sources

ECHR, via the ECHR siteStrasbourg is a beautiful city: it possesses a magnificent gothic cathedral; the Grande île is a UNESCO World Heritage site; and it is home to many European institutions, including the the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR, pictured left). It is a city with which Geraldine Kennedy, the Editor of the Irish Times, and Colm Keena, that paper’s Public Affairs Correspondent, will become very familiar, as they bring an exceedingly important case to the ECHR.

In Mahon Tribunal v Keena (No 1) [2009] 2 ILRM 373, [2009] IESC 64 (31 July 2009), the Supreme Court held that the Irish Times would not be compelled to disclose the source of a leaked Tribunal document which it had destroyed rather than produce to the Tribunal. Reversing the High Court ([2007] IEHC 348 (23 October 2007)), Fennelly J for a unanimous Supreme Court held:

68. Looking at the High Court judgment as a whole, I have come to the conclusion that the great weight which it attached to the reprehensible conduct of the appellants in destroying documents led it to adopt an erroneous approach to the balancing exercise.

69. According to the reasoning of the European Court in Goodwin [v United Kingdom 17488/90, (1996) 22 EHRR 123, [1996] ECHR 16 (27 March 1996)], an order compelling the appellants to answer questions for the purpose of identifying their source could only be “justified by an overriding requirement in the public interest.”

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