Students on Contract

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| Contract

As another Senior Freshman Law of Contract course gets underway, what do students really think of the Law of Contract? Jeremy Telman on ContractsProf Blog:

Contracts Law & Injustice

Scales of Justice, via ContractsProf BlogThis year, more than any other year, my students are telling me that they … they find it frustrating because contracts law seems to be set up to protect the well-resourced and the knowledgeable. Sure, they may be able to advise their clients on how to protect their legal interests, but only by adopting strategies designed to exploit the credulity, timidity and distraction of the weak. …

Oh dear.…

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Broadcasting Authority imminent

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| Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, Censorship, Media and Communications

Satellite uplinkThe Broadcasting Act, 2009 (pdf) sets the regulatory framework for broadcasting services in Ireland. It consolidates all Irish broadcasting legislation into a single Act, and establishes a new Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI, incorporating the functions of the current Broadcasting Commission and RTÉ Authority). According to Paul Cullen in today’s Irish Times, the BAI is to be established this week:

A new authority with powers to regulate all broadcasting, both commercial and RTÉ, is due to come into existence this week.

The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) is expected to begin operations next Tuesday once the Cabinet approves five nominations to its board by Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan. The remaining four board members will be appointed by the Government on the nomination of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications.

A little while ago, the Sunday Business Post reported that the Committee has decided to advertise those posts, so that it will be some time before they are appointed and that the Board will be only partially in place this week. Whether fully or partially established, there will be much for it to. For example, Cullen reports that

… One of the first tasks of the new authority will be to draw up new rules governing the advertising of junk foods on television, something which is specifically provided for in the new legislation.

…

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Interesting times for restitution claims

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| Restitution

May you live in interesting times.

This is – apocryphally – an ancient Chinese curse. Whatever its provenance, the times are certainly interesting for those who seek restitution of taxes invalidly paid contrary to EU law. In Test Claimants in the FII Group Litigation v HM Revenue & Customs [2008] EWHC 2893 (Ch) (27 November 2008) Henderson J dealt with a series of issues arising in such claims, and in Test Claimants in the VIC Group Litigation; FJ Chalke Ltd & Anor v Revenue & Customs [2009] EWHC 952 (Ch) (08 May 2009) he held that EU law required compound interest to be paid on such claims. This is in contrast to the position at national law, where the courts have held that similar claims to restitution of overpaid taxes (such as was pleaded in the more recent Bloomsbury International Ltd v Sea Fish Industry Authority [2009] EWHC 1721 (QB) (24 July 2009)) only attract simple interest (see my piece “Interesting Times. Overpaid Taxes, Restitution and Compound Interest” (2005) 27 DULJ (ns) 343-363). After Chalke, the Times reported that this could pave the pay for claims amounting to more than £1 billion, and in my previous post I noted that the Financial Times later reported that the Revenue had put aside five times this amount to deal with these and similar claims.…

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Revising the statute book is dusty but serious business

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| Irish Law

Title page of 'Statutes at Large, 1310' via TCD library websiteFurther to my three posts on the Statute Law Revision Act, 2007 (also here), I note that the second stage of the sibling Statute Law Revision Bill, 2009 was taken in the Dáil on Thursday. Friday’s Irish Times had a suitably colourful take on it: Bill to repeal statute laws dating back to Henry VIII.

In this process of tidying up the statute book, Ireland has been followed first by Westminster and then by Holyrood. In fact, it is a very important piece of legislation which will tidy up a statute book which still has more than 10,000 old Acts (3,182 pre-1751 Private Acts and 7,543 pre-1851 Local and Personal Acts) of which only 138 contain provisions of ongoing relevance. Apart from these 138 Acts specifically listed in Schedule 1 of the Bill, section 2 proposes the repeal of the other spent or obsolete Acts (1,351 are specifically listed in Schedule 2; the others will be implicitly repealed by their not being saved and referred to in Schedule 1 to the Bill). As Brian Hunt of Dublin solicitors firm Mason Hayes & Curran pointed out at an earlier stage in the process, this is difficult, technical, toilsome work with few visible results; but it is entirely necessary; and I’m delighted to see that it is progressing so effectively.…

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Online disruption of the classical university model

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| Universities

Hibernian College logo, via their site.A little while ago I blogged about the potential challenge which online education can pose for the traditional model of the university, comparing and contrasting the positions of newspapers and universities as they face online challenges. Now I see that Grant McCracken is also musing that what’s happening to journalism may some day happen to higher education (disintermediating higher education) – the Washington Post also notes that online classes are just cheaper to produce – but then McCracken points out that whilst there may be a move towards self-instruction, the key difference between newspapers and universities is accreditation:

We will continue to need a university, or someone, to certify students have completed their degree requirements, and perhaps how they did. Then the question becomes:

what’s the best way to do accreditation?

The English universities are a useful indicator. Traditionally, they forgave the separation [of] knowledge acquisition from examination. The universities allowed the student an extraordinary latitude. If a student could pass her exams, it didn’t matter if she had spent all her time in the college bar. She was good to go.

We could use a model of this kind. We would leave it to students to prepare their own programs of education, to gather on line with whomever they found interesting and useful.

…

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Lust, Satire and Academic Insularity

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| Juvenal, Universities

As a counterpoint to the THE‘s piece on The seven deadly sins of the academy, about which I wrote here, Mary Beard has exasperatedly pointed out that the entry about lust was – as the author himself has also had to explain – satirical:

Sex with students? Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal?

Poster from Beard's article in TimesOnline

… I hadn’t realised that there was a storm about Terence Kealey‘s piece on Lust … So I took a look at it. … It was instantly clear to me that this was SATIRE. … Taking several more, careful looks at the Kealey piece, I was left in no doubt that he was aiming his darts at the ways crude sexual exploitation of female students gets justified, by satircally mimicking the locker room style in which it is discussed. Come on everyone, NO VICE-CHANCELLOR (not even of Buckingham) calls women students a “perk” unless satirically (and aiming a dart at precisely those assumptions). Honest.

It was however a dreadful experience looking not only at the press reports of all this but also the comments of the THE website (some of which were presumably written by academics, who showed no ability to read or understand satire AT ALL .

…

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Hello blasphemy … Bye bye debate?

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| Blasphemy

'Hello Divorce, Bye Bye Daddy' posterI’ve been putting some slides together for a talk I’m doing tonight at Ignite Dublin #1, and my colleague Dr Neville Cox provided me with the Sunday Independent cartoon which was the subject of the only attempt to prosecute mount a prosecution for blasphemy in Ireland since the adoption of the Constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann) in 1937. The case is Corway v Independent Newspapers [1999] 4 IR 485; [2000] 1 ILRM 426; [1999] IESC 5 (30 July 1999). In the aftermath of the 1995 referendum which removed the constitutional ban on divorce, the Sunday Independent published an article by Dr Conor Cruise-O’Brien, on the implications of that referendum. The article was accompanied by this cartoon:

Progress



During the course of the campaign, those opposed to the amendment ran a powerful advertising campaign built around the slogan “Hello Divorce … Bye Bye Daddy …” (pdf; see the poster at the start of this post), and the cartoon’s caption was clearly a play upon that slogan. In Corway, the applicant wished to commence a prosecution for blasphemous libel against the cartoon and caption, on the grounds that they were calculated to insult the feelings and religious convictions of catholic readers by treating the sacrament of the Eucharist and its administration as objects of scorn and derision.…

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