In yesterday’s Sunday Business Post, I argued that the IMF deal can change the Irish legal system for the better, reflecting arguments I have already made here and here.

IMF deal can change the Irish legal system for the better

The IMF deal has provoked a great deal of discussion, from its impact on our political and economic sovereignty, through the details of tax increases, state spending cuts and the implementation timetable, to the question of whether it needs to be ratified by Dáil resolution or even referendum. But there is a lot more to it than that.

IMF packages typically require structural reform to open the labour market and encourage competition in goods and services. The memorandum of understanding between the IMF and our government is no different. It requires the government to introduce legislation to remove restrictions on trade and competition in professions such as law, medicine and pharmacy. …

The IMF memorandum made it clear that all of the necessary legislation must be enacted by the end of the third quarter of 2011. This is probably not an impossible target, as these recommendations were not new in 2005 and 2006: many of them had been made in a report in 1990. Moreover, many other jurisdictions have already been down the same road. .. There are, therefore, many precedents to aid the Department of Justice in drafting the necessary legislation. It is unfortunate that successive governments have not implemented these reports.

Read the full piece here. Picking up on this, Rossa McMahon has rather dryly observed that the Government could help bring down legal costs overnight, but won’t. He concluded that if the IMF reforms “are implemented in the relatively short timeframe of the programme, they would represent something of a Big Bang for the professions”.

Following on from my post on the impact of the IMF bailout on Irish legal education, I see from today’s Irish Times that the Bar Council (logo left) is not happy with some of the proposals, in particular those directed to the establishment of an independent statutory Legal Services Commission:

Parts of legal sector reform ‘not in public interest’

CAROL COULTER, Legal Affairs Editor

THE BAR Council has criticised proposals concerning the legal professions in the Government’s four-year plan and in the EU-International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme of financial support. … Responding to queries from The Irish Times, the Bar Council said it welcomed aspects of the plan and the programme:

However, there are other aspects which have come as some surprise to the Bar Council, and which cause it concern, not because of any sectional or selfish interest but because they do not appear to be in the public interest.

… Bar Council chairman Paul O’Higgins SC said the Council had not been made aware of any detailed proposal to give effect to the establishment of an agency described as an “independent regulator” and it awaited details:

The Bar Council notes that the position of legal services ombudsman has recently been advertised in the national press. It is not clear how that position will interact with what may be a further State agency, namely, the ‘independent regulator’. …

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? The article finished with a quote from me:

the single most effective reform of the legal system would be the establishment of an independent regulator and the introduction of genuinely competitive tendering.

I don’t agree with the Bar Council’s point about there being a potential conflict between the Legal Services Commission and the Legal Services Ombudsman. The role of that office (which I welcomed when the current legislation was initially published) is to oversee the handling by the Law Society and Bar Council of complaints by clients of solicitors and barristers. The Ombudsman is independent in the performance of the functions of the office. There is no reason why this function could not simply be folded into the more general Legal Services Commission. For example, the Ombudsman could be a member of the Commission, and the Ombudsman’s office could be a division within the broader functions of the Commission. Moreover, there is no reason why the Ombudsman should not be given greater powers in respect of disciplinary matters relating to both branches of the profession: in particular, that office could be the first port of call for parties seeking to complain about a solicitor or barrister, and not simply be an appeal body from an internal complaints system.

Other divisions within the Legal Services Commission can take up the other functions recommended by the Legal Costs Working Group in 2005 and the Competition Authority in 2006. One of these concerns extending the provision of professional legal education beyond the monopolies currently enjoyed by the Law Society in training solicitors and the King’s Inns in training barristers. Most other common law countries have gone this route. In my view, it is long past time for Ireland to do the same. My only regret is that is has taken the IMF to make us do it!

I never thought I’d see the day when I’d put both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Irish legal education together in the title of a blogpost. But there it is, above. And this is because the summary of the the Joint EU-IMF Programme for Ireland on the Department of the Taoiseach website suggests that there will be consequences for legal education:

Competition

Removal of restrictions to competition in sheltered sectors including:

Legal profession:

- establish an independent regulator;

- implement the recommendations of the Legal Costs Working Group and outstanding Competition Authority recommendations. …

The enhancement of competition and the reduction of regulation in sheltered sectors is a standard IMF prescription, so this recommendation comes as little surprise. As for its details, the Legal Costs Working Group was established in 2004 and asked to look at the way in which legal costs are determined and assessed, and it reported in 2005 (pdf). In December 2006, as part of a series of reports on regulated professions, the Competition Authority published a Report on the Legal Professions which determined that the legal profession was in need of substantial reform. Read the rest of this entry »

This is how Fennelly J began his judgment for the Supreme Court in Central Applications Office v Minister for Community Rural and Galeltacht Affairs [2010] IESC 32 (13 May 2010). The Court granted a declaration that respondent Minister did not have the power under the Official Languages Act, 2003 (also here) to designate the applicant as a public body subject to obligations imposed by the Act concerning the conduct of its affairs in both official languages. The CAO today publishes its second round of offers of third level places for the forthcoming academic year, and in the inauspicious technical landscape of a Supreme Court appeal, Fennelly J provided an excellent primer on the operations of the Central Applications Office (the CAO; logo, above left):

is a company limited by guarantee and is a non-profit body. It was formed in 1976 and is based in Galway. … The State has no responsibility for its operation. The members of the CAO are the third-level institutions which it serves. Prior to the establishment of the CAO in 1976, there was no centralised system for processing applications from students seeking admission to third level. … The universities … decided to form a single body to process applications. The CAO now has 44 participant Higher Education Institutions …

The process by which the CAO matches applications (from students) and offers (from institutions) is as follows. Each student makes a single application to the CAO early in the year. The student specifies, in order of preference, the preferred colleges and courses of study. Each institution decides on the number of places it will offer in each category and informs the CAO. The CAO relates the student’s application with [that student's] Leaving Certificate results. It then makes an offer to the student on a form described as “offer notice” which specifies the course being offered and the institution offering it. It invites the student to return a part of the form specifying acceptance. …

This is a far more elegant explanation than the one I essayed in an earlier post, in which I went on to explain that grades of the last-admitted candidate to a course can be regarded as the cut-off for qualification for entry to that course, and that these grades can be expressed as a function of points in a range from 0 to 600. In that earlier post, I set out the points levels for entry into various law courses on the basis of the CAO’s first round of offers.

Each year, not all of the CAO’s offers are accepted, with the result that some courses have vacancies. The third level institutions notify the CAO of the vacancies, and it issues a further round of offers. Where the points of the last-admitted candidate on this round are lower than those of the last-admitted candidate in the first round, the CAO also publishes the revised points cut-off. This year, the second round of offers of places was made today, and the points requirements for some law courses were revised accordingly. (Of course, some of these offers will not be accepted, and the third level institutions and the CAO will continue to make further offers as necessary to fill their courses).

In the table below (after the jump), I set out the final points requirements for law degrees in the various third level institutions. The first number, in bold font, is the final points requirement. Where the points were revised in round 2, the points for round 1 are then set out in regular font, prefaced by “R1:”. Finally, for the sake of completeness, where the course was offered last year, the final points for 2009 are set out in italics in parentheses. Read the rest of this entry »

My previous post on the advent of the Irish Law Journal led to some quite interesting discussion about the nature of citation styles and how crowded the market for legal journals in Ireland is.

By way of supplement, I see that 15 Lambton Quay records the final publication of New Zealand’s uniform style guide. I blogged about it at the proposal stage here. Up until now, Law schools, law firms, publishers and courts have been using their own idiosyncratic and confusing styles when referring to legal material. Now, New Zealand’s six law schools, three main legal publishers, major law reviews, and a number of courts, including the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, have adopted the guide this year. From the 15 Lambton Quay website [with added links]:

The Guide was launched by Justice John McGrath. A uniform guide has been a long time coming! .. The new guide is the result of the combined efforts of many across the profession. Justice Chambers of the Court of Appeal spearheaded the project … The guide was only made possible through generous funding from the New Zealand Law Foundation. …

A web-based version of the guide has been made available on the New Zealand law Foundation’s website. In my earlier post, by reference to the New Zealand rugby team, I proposed, not quite tongue in cheek, that since the dominant US style is the Bluebook, perhaps we should call the New Zealand style guide the All Black Book. This is even more likely now that it has been published with an All Black cover, above left.

As for the the Bluebook, its 19th edition has recently been published, along with the 7th edition of the McGill Guide, and the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. In my view, there now are far too many style guides world-wide, and some consolidation would be very beneficial.

Many things about Ireland bemuse visitors to our shores. Two of the most difficult to explain are our electoral system and the programme by which third level places are allocated. I’ll leave the former to other election anoraks for the time being, but the latter is much in the news this week, so I’ll try to give a simple account of how it works.

The Central Applications Office (logo, above left) processes all applications to first year undergraduate courses in the country’s various third level institutions. In early summer, students at the end of their secondary (high) school careers sit a state examination, and the results are published in early August. During the course of that final year, most of the students will have filled in a list of their preferred third level courses and returned it to the CAO. In mid-August, the CAO assign university places to students based on their exam results.

Allocation of places is simply a function of demand and supply. A third level institution will inform the CAO of the number of places in a given course, and the CAO’s computer will allot places on the course to the highest qualified applicants who had applied for that course. The grades of the last-admitted candidate can be regarded as the cut-off for qualification for entry to that course.

In the final state exam, each letter grade is assigned a level of points (eg, an A1 is worth 100 points, a C3 is worth 60 points, etc). The CAO takes each candidate’s best 6 grades to calculate the points total of each candidate (eg, a candidate who got six A1s is will have 600 points, a candidate who got six C3s will have 360 points, etc). Hence, the grades of the last-admitted candidate on a course can be represented in terms of these points, and the entry requirement for any given third-level course in any given year can be represented in terms of points.

Scaled up across every applicant for every third-level course, it is clear that the CAO system is a significant undertaking. This year, the first round of offers of places in third level institutions was made yesterday, and the cut-off points levels for their various law degree offerings are below the jump. (Update: I’ve blogged about the second round final points here). Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve already posted here, the Fourth Legal Education Symposium will be hosted by the School of Law, University of Limerick in the Kemmy Business School on Friday, 14 May 2010.

Due to the generous sponsorship of Limerick solicitors’ firm Holmes O’Malley Sexton, there is no conference fee, but registration is essential, and a form is available by email.The programme for the day includes two plenary sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and several parallel workshop session in both the morning and the afternoon.

Speaking in the morning plenary session on The Purpose of a Law Degree will be Professor Fiona Cownie, Keele University, Dr John Temple Lang, Cleary Gottlieb Steen Hamilton, Brussels, and Professor Paul McCutcheon, Vice President Academic, University of Limerick.

Speaking in the afternoon plenary session on Promoting Legal Research will be Professor Sally Wheeler, Queens University,Belfast, Dr Neville Cox, Trinity College Dublin, and Professor Sandeep Gopalan, NUI Maynooth.

Kudos to Sinead Eaton for putting together a really excellent package.

The Fourth Legal Education Symposium will be hosted by the School of Law, University of Limerick on Friday, 14 May 2010. Kindly sponsored by Limerick solicitors’ firm Holmes O’Malley Sexton, it promises to be a fascinating event.

The themes for the plenary sessions are the Purpose of a Law Degree and Promoting Legal Research; and confirmed speakers include Professor Sally Wheeler of Queens University Belfast (outgoing Chair of the Socio-Legal Studies Association) and Professor Fiona Cownie of Keele University (outgoing Chair of the Society of Legal Scholars).

In addition to the plenary sessions, papers are invited for workshops on the following eight topics:

• Interdisciplinary law degrees;
• Clinical legal education;
• E-learning;
• Integration of teaching and research;
• The law teacher as mentor;
• Law for non-law students;
• Engaging students with the curriculum;
• Undergraduate legal writing.

The organiser is Sinead Eaton, and she invites 300-500 word abstracts of possible presentations before Friday 2nd April.