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 the web.

I have no sympathy at all with their no-longer-to-be-Lordships on the physical address point. An address is an address, and that’s that; their dislike for Little George Street is silly, infantile special pleading. They should worry less about the size of their George Street, and more about what they do in it.

I have a little more sympathy with them as far as the domain name is concerned because they are not part of government – indeed, respecting the separation of powers was the reason (although a completely misguided one in my view) for bringing the Supreme Court into existence, so it seems strange to give it a domain that apparently links it to government.

However. Lord Hope say he’d have liked supremecourt.uk, but the problem with that is that the rules prevent people from registering pure “.uk” or “top level” domains of that kind nowadays. So, as with the street address, Lord Hope is I’m afraid expressing a desire to be exempt from, or above, the rules applicable to everyone else. No more impressive an attitude from a constitutional court than it is from Parliament.

And anyway, if they don’t like being associated with the executive, why don’t they use uksupremecourt.org.uk? The Ministry of Justice has bagged it for them. Or uksupremecourt.org, which is still available?

2009-01-28T08:42:00+00:00Tags: |