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Category: General

JURIST – Paper Chase: US lawmaker proposes amendment limiting corporate campaign spending

12 December, 2011
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| General
Photo source or description

[JURIST] Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) [official website] on Thursday introduced a constitutional amendment that would exclude a corporation’s First Amendment [text] rights to spend money on political campaigns. Named the Saving American Democracy Amendment [text, PDF] the proposal would make clear that corporations are not afforded the same constitutional rights as people and that the political activities of corporations can be regulated by the government. Sanders added that the law would also ban unlimited corporate campaign contributions to candidates.

via jurist.org
…

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UK Supreme Court lawyers allowed to dress down (The Independent)

22 November, 2011
| 1 Comment
| General

Lawyers appearing at the UK’s highest court will no longer have to wear traditional dress, it was announced today.

From now on advocates in cases heard at the Supreme Court in London will be able to “dispense with any or all of the elements of traditional court dress”.

The announcement was made by the court’s president, Lord Phillips.

Supreme Court justices do not wear legal dress themselves.

via independent.co.uk
…

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Sturgeon’s Law, n. : Oxford English Dictionary

22 November, 2011
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A humorous aphorism which maintains that most of any body of published material, knowledge, etc., or (more generally) of everything is worthless …

via oed.com
…

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Wigs, gowns, and sartorial expression

4 November, 201125 October, 2012
| 8 Comments
| Court dress, General
Sir Robert Megarry, by Anthony Morris, via the RP website
Sir Robert Megarry, by Anthony Morris, via the Royal Society of Portrait Painters website

At the beginning of the current legal year, Irish judges broke with three centuries of tradition, and ceased wearing wigs in court. On 13 October last, the Minister for Justice issued a press release stating that he had signed into law two new Statutory Instruments to make the wearing of ceremonial wigs optional in the courts. The Statutory Instruments came into force the following day, 14 October, just in time for the new legal term (Irish Times, here, here, and here). The making of the SIs was duly gazetted in Iris Oifigúil on 18 October (see (2011) 83 Iris Oifigúil 1417; pdf). Hence, the Circuit Court Rules (Judges Robes) 2011 (SI No 523 of 2011) and the Rules of the Superior Courts (Robes of Bench) 2011 (SI No 524 of 2011) dispensed with the requirement that judges wear ceremonial wigs in court. However, it is only this week, a full three weeks since the Minister’s press release, that the full text of the SIs became available online. (As I have asked many times before on this blog, why does it take so long for such important legal information as cases, SIs, and Acts, to be made generally available online?).…

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Protecting Hyperlinks and Preserving First Amendment Values on the Internet by Anjali Dalal :: SSRN

26 October, 2011
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In the same week that the Supreme Court of Canada decides Crookes v Newton, I discover the following fascinating article on SSRN:

Protecting Hyperlinks and Preserving First Amendment Values on the Internet

Anjali Dalal


Yale University – Yale Information Society Project

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, Vol. 13, No. 4, May 2011

Hyperlinks are critical to communication in part because they facilitate access to information. They provide visitors on one website a way to navigate to internally referenced words, phrases, arguments, and ideas. In addition to being vehicles for communication, this article contends that hyperlinks are communicative in and of themselves. They signal user preferences, democratize the national dialogue, indicate credibility, function as a signature on a virtual petition and help establish virtual associations. This Article presents the first comprehensive examination of First Amendment concerns related to hyperlinks and argues that any judicial or legislative regulation of hyperlinks should be reviewed under a strict scrutiny standard. Nearly 50 years ago, the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional privilege to disseminate information in New York Times v. Sullivan. In Sullivan, the Court extended a constitutional privilege to newspapers because of their role as an incredibly important, unique medium of communication.

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Bugs and Beasts Before the Law

24 October, 201124 October, 2011
| 2 Comments
| General

In Isn’t it funny, how a bear likes honey?, I considered the conviction of a Macedonian bear for theft of honey and criminal damage to a beekeeper’s hives; and in Are some goats more equal than others? I noted that a goat was being held on suspicion of committing an armed robbery in Nigeria. Now I find another story in the same vein:

Bugs and Beasts Before the Law

Murderous pigs sent to the gallows, sparrows prosecuted for chattering in Church, a gang of thieving rats let off on a wholly technical acquittal – theoretical psychologist and author Nicholas Humphrey explores the strange world of medieval animal trials.

… A few years ago I lighted on a book, first published in 1906, with the surprising title The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals [pdf] by E.P.Evans, author of Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture, Bugs and Beasts before the Law, etc., etc. The frontispiece showed an engraving of a pig, dressed up in a jacket and breeches, being strung up on a gallows in the market square of a town in Normandy in 1386; the pig had been formally tried and convicted of murder by the local court.

…

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Michael Geist – SCC Stands Up for the Internet: No Liability for Linking

19 October, 2011
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| General

An excellent comment by Michael Geist on Crookes v Newton:

This decision is amongst the most important the Supreme Court has issued involving the Internet. The court again demonstrates that it recognizes the importance of the Internet for freedom of expression and for the need to promote the ability to use the technology to disseminate information. The court clearly understood both the importance of linking as well as the technology behind a link. The decision rightly places responsibility for defamatory speech where it belongs – with the person who posted the content. There is still the ability to commence legal action against that person, but subjecting anyone that links to allegedly defamatory content to potential liability would have been very dangerous.

via michaelgeist.ca
…

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Lallands Peat Worrier: “Immanuel Kant should be banned…”

19 October, 2011
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“Immanuel Kant should be banned…”

I’m struggling to think of the last time I heard anyone in Scottish politics say “I believe in free expression“, without following it with a “but”, or some other pious caveat, justifying illiberal legislation to put peoples’ tongues in the vice, fetter their fingers, or otherwise curtail free speech. This is not a uniquely Scottish phenomenon, of course. The whole rhetoric of balancing rights against one another lends itself to this sort of discourse, where one can simultaneously avow your watery support for a range of competing propositions – free speech, protection of minorities from “hate”, public order – and having recognised a range of entangled interests, and completed the relevant obeisances to all sides, unembarrassedly legislate, untroubled by dissonances as you obliterate the substance of liberty.  All of which is done with a greasy air of self-justification and secular homily; a ludicrous pantomime parade of beetled brows and serious faces, as pompous moral vocabularies are dusted off to justify a range of reactionary reforms.  Politicians assume grave airs to have their photos snapped by Amnesty International – all too happy to condemn repressive regimes abroad for jailing bloggers, writers, speakers – but seem to struggle to find the time even to shrug about domestic outrages.

…

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Welcome

Me in a hat

Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


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