Change in the structure of legal education is in the air. It is one of the themes of the Second Legal Education Symposium which will be hosted by the Faculty of Law, University College Cork, on Friday 7 December 2007. As with last year’s symposium, this year’s will also be generously sponsored by Dillon Eustace, Solicitors.

This symposium will bring together various parties with an interest in legal education including students, teachers, researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and more – in the hope of enriching the debate and informing future decisions. The theme of the morning session will concern the undergraduate curriculum and will include a key-note address by Professor Joseph W. Singer (Harvard) describing recent (and much discussed and debated) curriculum reforms there. The afternoon session will focus on the implications of Fourth Level Ireland for Law Schools.

Harvard isn’t the only US law school to think about curriculum reform; there is in fact a robust discussion of these issues ongoing at present in many US law schools, including Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt; and another exciting change has been made by up-and-coming University of Detroit Mercy School of Law in their Law Firm Program. Nor are these the only kinds of curriculum reform being contemplated. The most recent issue of the Vanderbilt Law Review, (volume 60, no. 2, March 2007) contains a Symposium on the Future of Legal Education (blogged here, here and here). Read the rest of this entry »

Let me take you back to a time in which the market for delivery of letters was dominated by large national monopolies or former monopolies, and impatient potential entrants worried the incumbents. Oh wait; that’s today. Postal workers in various EU countries, unhappy at European plans (existing legislation here) to attain greater liberalisation in the postal market, held scattered strikes in Ireland, Belgium and Hungary, though there was little strike activity in France, and none at all in Germany, Poland and the UK.

But that’s also Ireland of the early 1980s, when a company called Paperlink sought to run a letter delivery service in Dublin. This contravened the Post Office’s monopoly on letter delivery conferred by section 34(2) of the Post Office Act, 1908; and in AG v Paperlink Ltd [1983] IEHC 1; [1984] ILRM 373 (15th July 1983) Costello J held that this monopoly did not infringe Paperlink’s constitutional right to communicate. The effects of his analysis, baleful for most of its existence but now pregnant with positive possibility, are the focus of my paper at this weekend’s conference on The Constitution at 70 (website | brochure (pdf)) organized by colleagues at the School of Law, TCD.

If you are coming along, please say hello.

Irish broadcasting regulation is undergoing a significant change, what with the Department of Communications review of the Television Without Frontiers Directive as part of the EU Commission’s proposals for a new Audio Visual Media Services Directive and the Department’s Digital Terrestrial Television trial and its attendant Broadcasting (Amendment) Bill, 2006 (see press releases: BCI; Department). A central plank of all of these changes is the Broadcasting Bill, 2006, and the audience at the Dublin Legal Workshop last week were treated to a discussion of its strengths and weaknesses by David McMunn (pictured above left) Director of Government, Regulatory and Legal Affairs for TV3.

Establishing a commercial broadcast sector in competition with RTE in Ireland must have seemed a slow process. Read the rest of this entry »