Law – Page 5 – cearta.ie

Legal Education, again

24 January, 20085 April, 2008

The Faculty of Law, University College Cork hosted the second annual Legal Education Symposium on Friday 7 December last (I blogged about it here and here). Now comes news that the video of the event has just been made available here. Last week, I mentioned that DaithÃ had pointed out (in a post I wished I’d written) that the UCC Law Faculty is very much to the forefront in online law matters, and making video of their events available online is just one example of their leadership in this important area.

Bonus link no 1: If you scroll to near the bottom of the video page, you will find an older video of me discussing the (benighted) Defamation Bill (not yet enacted, but on its way through the Seanad for the second time, and I hold out hope that the long wait will soon – well, soonish, but finally and eventually – be over!).

Bonus link no 2: There is an important debate right now in the US blogs about the importance of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Important contributions are here (most recent at the time of writing of this post), here (excellent roundup with links), here (a common sense contribution with which I mostly agree, for many of these reasons) and here & here (the posts that sparked this round of commentary).…

The shape of things to come?

22 January, 200822 January, 2008

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| Law

Posted in Slaw, a view of the present state of the Supreme Court of Canada:

Top Court Truly Wired

by Simon Chester on January 21st, 2008

Simon reported from the Lexum Conference on Justice Bastarache’s speech on the Supreme Court of Canada’s technology plans.

Completely unofficially, here is a picture from last Wednesday, showing the extent of the court’s commitment – every place at the counsel table is wired, the central desk from which counsel addresses the court looks like a command centre. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

I didn’t have a chance to peek behind the judges’ area – I suspect that is permanently off-limit to mere mortals – but I suspect that the bench will be similarly wired. As the court moves to digital factums, counsel will need to be nimble with the mouse as well as the orator’s tongue.

When will we see similar technology in the (still unfortunately overworked) Irish Supreme Court? …

The Future of Legal Education – again

12 December, 20075 April, 2008

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| Law, Legal Education, Universities

It never rains but it pours: no sooner have I learned about the international Conference on the Future of Legal Education on 20-23 February 2008 in Georgia State University College of Law (blogged about here), but I discover a European equivalent later that month.

The European Law Faculties Association (ELFA) – which was founded in 1995, publishes the European Journal of Legal Education, and currently focuses upon the reform of legal education in Europe – will host a conference on The role of law schools in continuing legal education (CLE) on 28 February-1 March 2008 in Bucerius Law School, Hamburg, Germany (the first private law school in Germany). The programme is here (pdf); in the absence of any Irish speakers that I can see, I am particularly interested in

Law schools facing the challenge of CLE â€“ the British perspective

by Prof John Bell (Cambridge)

…

The Future of Legal Education

11 December, 20076 October, 2008

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| Carneige, Law, Legal Education, Universities

Hot on the heels of the Legal Education Symposium blogged about yesterday comes news of an international Conference on the Future of Legal Education on 20-23 February 2008 in Georgia State University College of Law. Against the background of the Carneige Foundation‘s report on Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (which I have already discussed on this blog), this conference will ask two related questions:

First, if one were charged with starting a new law school, how would one implement the Carnegie recommendations? …

Second, how would an existing law school transform itself into the kind of law school envisioned by the Carnegie Report?

I have already blogged about the first question, and both will be discussed by a wide selection of exciting speakers, including Martin BÃ¶hmer (Founding Dean, Universidad de San Andres School of Law; CV (.doc)), Gary Davis (Flinders), Jeff Giddings (Griffith), Richard Johnstone (Griffith), Patrick Longan (Mercer), Sally Kift (QUT), Paul Maharg (Strathclyde) (author of the superb Transforming Legal Education), Lawrence C. Marshall (Stanford), David McQuoid-Mason (KwaZulu-Natal), N.R. Madhava Menon (National Law School of India), James E. Moliterno (William & Mary), M.R.K. Prasad (Salgaocar, India), Suellyn Scarnecchia (New Mexico), William Sullivan (Carnegie Foundation; lead author of Educating Lawyers) and David Weisbrot (ALRC, formerly Sydney).…

The Future of Irish Legal Education

10 December, 200710 February, 2009

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| Law, Legal Education, Universities

And so to my Alma Mater, University College Cork (UCC), where the Faculty of Law hosted the second annual Legal Education Symposium last Friday. This year’s event, organised by Dr Fidelma White and Mr Gerard Murphy and again generously sponsored by Dillon Eustace Solicitors, had a decidedly transatlantic flavo(u)r, with of course a good deal of Cork relish as well.

The venue was UCC’s handsome 19th century Aula Maxima (pictured above left), and the delegates were welcomed in a characteristically witty and incisive speech by Dermot Gleeson, SC (former Attorney General, current Chairman of the Governing Body of UCC, and quondam lecturer in the UCC Law Faculty). He shared with us some thoughts on the various-interlinkages between the academy, practice, and the bench. He said that the best superior court judge since independence was Seamus Henchy (something I have long also believed), in part because Gleeson likes the way Henchy wrote, which Gleeson speculated may be in part because Henchy was a law professor in UCD before he went to the bench. He concluded by expressing his skepiticism about the instant transferability the science model of PhDs to Irish law, a matter to which I will return below.…

TCD Lecture by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

9 November, 200716 January, 2009

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| Law

On Friday 23 November 2007, at 10.00am, the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, in association with the Department of Foreign Affairs, will host a guest lecture by Louise Arbour (former judge of the Supreme Court of Canada, former Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, and now UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; see CBC | wikipedia), entitled:

Responsibility to Protect as a Duty of Care in International Law and Practice

The lecture will take place in the Exam Hall (map here); all are welcome to attend; please RSVP.

The lecture will address the historical origins and development of the responsibility to protect norm, its fundamental differences from the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, the legal core of responsibility to protect and when and how the norm is engaged, the role that UN institutions can play in interpreting and applying the norm and mechanisms of cooperation available to the international community.

It promises to be a fascinating lecture, and I am greatly looking forward to it. It is no exaggeration to say that the international community has not dealt very well either with calls for or with cases of humanitarian intervention, especially over the last ten to fifteen years or so.…

The ultimate outrage

6 November, 20078 September, 2008

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| Capital Punishment, Law, US Supreme Court

A few weeks ago, The Economist published a Special Report on Capital Punishment in America entitled Revenge begins to seem less sweet. The theme was that Americans – except in Texas – are losing their appetite for the death penalty. One of the many points in a typically well-written, balanced and informative piece was that

It is now far more expensive to execute someone than to jail him for life; in North Carolina, for instance, each capital case costs $2m more. Ordinary inmates need only to be fed and guarded. Those on death row must have lawyers arguing expensively about their fate, sometimes for a decade or more … The system of appeals has grown more protracted because of fears that innocent people may be executed. Few would argue that such safeguards are not needed, but their steep cost gives abolitionists a new line of attack.

This was graphically illustrated by a story in the New York Times last week, headlined: Capital Cases Stall as Costs Grow Daunting: …

Judicial Review

24 October, 20078 September, 2008

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| Law, US Supreme Court

As I’ve already mentioned here and here, last Thursday, the University of Washington and Lee‘s branch of the American Constitution Society hosted a great Supreme Court Discussion Panel, Looking Back and Moving Forward, to recap the US Supreme Court’s 2006-2007 term and to preview its 2007-2008 term. This post looks at three more of the presentations, covering abortion, elections, detention, and sentencing.…