January 2009

How to address the Supreme Court

January 28, 2009

I’m way behind Charon and John Bolch with this story, but must throw in my tuppenceworth. It seems that Lord Hope and his pals on the well-upholstered putative Supreme Court bench are unhappy about the address of the new court, in Little George Street, SW1, and with the domain name the court will have on [...]

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A good week for Basildon

January 26, 2009

It was a jolly good week in court last week for Basildon Council. First, they won against the Equality and Human Rights Commission in this case about travellers in the Court of Appeal; then they followed it up with this win against the golf club in the High Court. All sections of society must tremble [...]

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Au revoir, Rachida…

January 23, 2009

Oh no! She’s going! Not quite yet, but the French justice minister Rachida Dati will leave Nicolas Sarkozy’s government in a matter of weeks in order to run in the European elections. She’s being reshuffled out, basically. Shame. She may be an aggro-magnet, but she’s been great fun right up to the end, coming back [...]

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Lords Judgment: R (Wright) v Secretary of State for Health

January 22, 2009

The House of Lords gave judgment yesterday in this human rights judicial review about provisional listing under Part VII of the Care Standards Act 2000, which sets up a scheme for “listing” people thought unsuitable to work with children and vulnerable adults – and preventing those listed from working in a care position. Before I [...]

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That bungled oath

January 22, 2009

He’s done it again, then. It was obviously Chief Justice Roberts’s fault; he was the only who put the adverb faithfully at the end of the second clause, rather than at the beginning, as it should be. Perhaps it was some mad fear of a split infinitive, or something. I bet Fowler would have diagnosed [...]

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Fuss and nonsense from Daniel Kawczynski

January 21, 2009

Here we go again. It only seems ten minutes since I was exasperated by the Damian Green affair, specifically the way MPs, media and blogs all focused quite wrongly on the extremely lawful and proper search of Damian Green’s Westminster office, while ignoring the highly improper arrest of the MP and the civil servant who [...]

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Carrie v Tolkein

January 21, 2009

This libel judgment from the High Court last week caught my eye: Eady J has struck out a libel claim about a blog comment under the Jameel jurisdiction to protect the court from abuse of process where there is no substantial publication of the allegedly defamatory stuff. The case was about a blog, specifically comments [...]

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Shadow Attorney mystery solved

January 20, 2009

It’s going to be… Dominic Grieve. Still. In addition to his post as shadow Justice secretary. As I’ve commented at Iain Dale’s Diary, I suppose it makes sense in a way for Justice and the shadow Attorney’s role to be combined if the Conservatives really want to make progress on their “British Bill of Rights” [...]

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John Mortimer

January 20, 2009

I know surprisingly little about John Mortimer, and can’t claim to have any special interest in him: I never read any of his books, and his apparently champagny socialism put me off him quite a bit, especially in the 1980s, when he seemed unaware of why anyone might be dissatisfied with what Labour was offering [...]

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Islington v Ladele: sanity restored

January 19, 2009

Something I’ve not yet commented on since my part facultative-festive and part enforced-technological break is the welcome restoration of sense and good legal analysis to the field of religious discrimination by the Employment Appeal Tribunal, which has reversed the much-publicised but obviously wrong decision at first instance in this case. Usefully Employed ran with the [...]

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