The fourth annual Law Student Colloquium will take place in the Graduates’ Memorial Building (map) and the Law School (map) Trinity College Dublin, on Saturday 4 February 2012.

The Colloquium is organised by law students for law students; it has been an enormous success over the past three years; and it has been made possible by the kind sponsorship of Allen & Overy and William Fry. For all enquiries please contact the organisers by email.

The centrepiece of the Colloquium will be the First Annual Brian Lenihan Memorial Address, which will take place at 6pm in the Graduates’ Memorial Building that evening. The Address has been organized by the Colloquium committee in order to mark Mr Lenihan’s substantial contribution to Irish public life, his longstanding connection to the Law School as a student, scholar, and lecturer, and his recent tragic death. It is envisaged that this will be the keynote event of the Colloquium from this year on.

This year’s Address is to be delivered by Judge Bryan McMahon, recently retired from the Irish High Court. The title of the address is ‘Judging‘ and in it Judge McMahon will discuss the craft of judging as well as the role of the judge in a modern democracy, and share with his audience insights accumulated during a varied career as an academic, practitioner, and judge. The event will be chaired by the former Attorney General of Ireland, Mr Paul Gallagher SC.

If you wish to attend, please contact the organisers by email.

The Irish Corporate Law Forum (ICLF) has just announced details of its inaugural conference, Transitioning to the New Form Private Company Limited by Shares: Structure and Governance under the Companies Bill, to be held on Thursday 21 July 2011 in the wonderful surroundings of the Coach House, Dublin Castle.

On 30 May 2011, the 952 sections of Parts 1-15 of the long-awaited draft Companies Bill were published by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. This Bill will implement recommendations of the Company Law Review Group to consolidate, modernise and reform company law in Ireland and represents the culmination of more than a decade of policy review of Irish company law. The legislation will have a significant impact on company structure and governance and is of particular relevance to directors, company secretaries, legal advisors, accountants and company formation agents.

This important conference will address key structural and governance implications for private companies including the replacement of the existing private company form with the new company limited by shares with unlimited corporate capacity and a single constitution replacing the current memorandum and articles of association. The conference will also address new procedures designed to simplify corporate governance and the implications of the Bill on the role and duties of directors and company secretaries. The full Conference Programme is here (.doc) and the Registration Form is here (.doc). Speakers include

• Dr Deirdre Ahern, Director of the Irish Corporate Law Forum and Lecturer in Law, Trinity College Dublin;
• Nessa Cahill BL, author of Company Law Compliance and Enforcement (Tottel Publishing, 2008);
• Helen Dixon, Registrar at the Companies Registration Office;
• Gordon Duffy BL, formerly lecturer in law at DCU and national examiner for company law for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland (now Chartered Accountants Ireland);
• Paul Egan, Partner and Chairman of the Corporate Department in Mason Hayes+Curran, and a member of the Company Law Review Group;
• Sinead Kelly, Associate and Professional Support Lawyer in the corporate and insolvency Departments at A&L Goodbody;
• Colm McDonnell, Partner in the Enterprise Risk Services division of Deloitte;
• David Mangan, Senior Associate at Mason Hayes+Curran;
• Deirdre Mooney, Associate and Head of Company Secretarial at William Fry;
• Declan Murphy BL, represents the Bar Council on the Company Law Review Group;
• Dr Ailbhe O’Neill BL, author of The Constitutional Rights of Companies (Round Hall, 2007) and co-editor of Corporate Governance and Regulation: An Irish Perspective (Round Hall, 2009);
• Aillil O’Reilly BL, member of the Drafting Committee of the Company Law Review Group.

Today is World Press Freedom Day (Unesco | IFEX | WPFD 2011 | WAN-IFRA), and there will be many events worldwide to celebrate, defend and promote press freedom. Free media are at the heart of freedom of expression, acting as watchdogs on governments, exposing corruption and rights abuses, and holding the powerful to account.

Piaras Kelly has news of an event today in Dublin marking World Press Freedom Day (with links by me):

Lal Wickrematunge’s brother, Lasantha, has been named as a “Hero of Press Freedom” by the International Press Institute following his murder by unknown assailants in 2009 when he was managing editor of The Sunday Leader, a Sri Lankan newspaper.

The Press Council of Ireland, in association with Ireland Aid, has arranged a free public lecture by Lal Wickrematunge to mark World Press Freedom Day on Tuesday 3 May 2011.

The lecture will take place between 2.30 pm – 4.00 pm in the Neil Hoey Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Fellows Square, Trinity College Dublin. If you would like to attend please RSVP to info@presscouncil.ie or (01) 6489130.

In unfortunate timing, some of my students have an exam at exactly the same time, so I can’t attend. But I’d love to have been able to do so, and I hope that next year’s exam timetable doesn’t get in the way!

Washington and Lee University School of Law and the American Law Institute are pleased to announce a conference on

Restitution Rollout: Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment

on February 25, 2011 in Lexington, Virginia.

The American Law Institute (ALI), the leading legal-reform organization in the United States, restates basic legal subjects to inform the legal profession what “the law” is in a particular subject. In 2010, the ALI approved the Restatement (Third) Restitution and Unjust Enrichment (2011), the subject of theRestitution Rollout.

Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment replaces the original Restatement of Restitution, promulgated in 1936. Restatement Third restores the full title, Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, that appeared on the Tentative Drafts of the original Restatement but was dropped when the official text was published, thus emphasizing that the subject matter encompasses the independent body of law of unjust enrichment, and not simply the remedy of restitution.

At the conference, ALI Reporter Andrew Kull and ALI Director Lance Liebman will introduce the Restatement Third of Restitution. They will be joined by leading Restitution and Contracts scholars including Joe Perillo, Lionel Smith, Emily Sherwin, John McCamus, Peter Linzer, and Caprice Roberts, among others. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark your diaries. The Annual Conference and AGM of the Irish Society of Comparative Law (ISCL: blog | website) will take place in University College Dublin

from Friday 29 April to Saturday 30 April 2011.

Call for Papers
The Society is seeking especially proposals which place Irish law (in either part of Ireland) in a comparative dimension but is also open to comparative analyses from other legal systems. Any topic in comparative law or legal systems may be proposed: private or public law, criminal law and criminal justice, legal education, legal history, etc. Papers on European or international law will also be considered. Proposals should be short (250 words) and emailed to Marie-Luce Paris, School of Law, University College Dublin. The deadline for receipt of proposals is 21 February 2011. You do not have to be a member of the ISCL to propose a paper.

Conference
The Annual General Meeting and first plenary address by Dr Eric Descheemaeker, University of Bristol, will take place on Friday 30 April. Conference sessions, the second plenary address by Professor Patrick Glenn, McGill University, and conference dinner will take place on Saturday 30 April. Further information will be available shortly via the ISCL’s blog.

The Irish Society of Comparative Law
The ISCL was established in June 2008 and is recognized by The International Academy of Comparative Law. The ISCL is open to those interested in Irish and comparative law. Its purpose is to encourage the comparative study of law and legal systems and to seek affiliation with individuals and organizations with complimentary aims. Queries should be emailed to the Secretary of the Society, Dr Bénédicte Sage-Fuller, Faculty of Law, University College Cork.

Future events
The next annual conference will be held in University College Cork on 2-3 March 2012.

A little later than promised, here are some thoughts that occurred to me at the recent seminar on Promoting innovation – Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy (which I blogged here and here). In the same way that browsers have a constant battle between features and speed, so the modern law of copyright is faced with a similar dilemma between encouraging and rewarding innovation. It is becoming increasingly clear that it has not solved this dilemma in a particularly satisfactory way. More than that, the most popular emerging solution – the introduction of a fair use defence to EU law – may not be sufficient for current needs, let alone for future developments.

At the seminar, Johnny Ryan argued that with the rise of the internet, where everything is in perpetual beta, we are in effect are reverting back to the pre-Gutenberg plasticity of information. In historical terms, this is the norm. It is the post-Gutenberg era of fixed information which is the anomaly. Copyright is a feature of this period: in the 1500s, it developed to protect the publishers; in the second half of the 1600s it came under increasing pressure to protect authors, and this was codified in the Statute of Anne, 1710; thereafter, the statutory protections were slowly expanded to other creators of other original works. The fundamental (even if increasingly questioned) justification for this development is that the copyright monopoly encourages the creation of original works.

This development of copyright has been a very slow process, but two current issues are putting significant pressure on this slow pace. The first is the evolution beyond the static to the plastic described by Johnny Ryan; the second is that the rate of this change is exponentially faster than heretofore. Copyright rules rules created for static texts which at best change slowly are rules that are ill-adapted to faster change and inappropriate to the modern reality of plastic texts. Read the rest of this entry »

As I said my first post yesterday, last Friday morning I attended a seminar on Promoting innovation – Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy, hosted by Google Ireland, co-sponsored by the Institute for International and European Affairs (IIEA), and chaired by TJ McIntyre. In that post, I summarized the presentations by Johnny Ryan (the internet has created a hinge in history when information is plastic and copyright law is a block upon total commerce) and Niall O’Riordan (for Google, a fair use doctrine in Ireland and Europe is an idea whose time has come). In this post, I’ll look at last Friday’s other presentations; and in tomorrow’s post, I’ll add a few comments of my own on some of the issues raised by the seminar.

Kate O’Sullivan (Director of Regulation and Public Policy, UPC Ireland) pointed out that intermediaries (such as Google, Facebook, and ISPs) are caught in the middle between content producers seeking to enforce their rights as against users, and it is not appropriate that ISPs should be judge and jury in such a cause. Section 40(3) of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 (also here) provides that the mere provision of facilities by an ISP, for example, which enable the making available to the public of copies of a work “shall not of itself constitute an act of making available to the public of copies of the work” and therefore shall not for that reason amount to a copyright infringement.

She examined the main rights of each of the three main involved: rights holders, subscribers, and intermediaries. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday morning, I attended a seminar on Promoting innovation – Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy (Irish Times | SiliconRepublic here and here). It was hosted by Google Ireland and co-sponsored the by Institute for International and European Affairs (IIEA); and the morning was very ably chaired by TJ McIntyre (blog | Chair, Digital Rights Ireland | Consultant, Merrion Legal | UCD). There were five presentations; in this post, I’ll deal with the first two; in the next tomorrow’s post, I’ll deal with the remaining three; and in a third post, I’ll add a few comments of my own on some of the issues raised by the seminar.

First up was Johnny Ryan (IIEA | author A History of the Internet and the Digital Future) speaking on “A hinge in history: the conditions of the digital future and the need of rights reform”, and setting the scene for the debates that would follow. (Update: Johnny comments below that video of his presentation is now available). For him, we live in the age of the perpetual beta. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, hand-transcribed manuscripts made information fluid. By contrast, after Gutenberg, the printed book fixed information in static form. But now, online, information is very flexible and plastic, again. Consider a wikipedia page: everything is open to challenge and experimentation – and perpetually beta. We are reverting back to the pre-Gutenberg plasticity of information. In historical terms, this is the norm. It is the post-Gutenberg era of fixed information which is the anomaly. Because of the internet, we have moved from a read-only (RO) culture to a read-write (RW) culture, a remix culture, where we can all adapt and re-invent, and this participation can be anywhere: anyone can be Andy Warhol, and the internet can be your Factory. This is the hinge in history of his title.

He argued that as we have moved from a RO to a RW culture, so can we move from RO to RW business. Read the rest of this entry »