March 2009

Congress acts while MPs pussyfoot around

March 31, 2009

Last week the House of Representatives in Washington passed a Bill taxing at about 90% the bonuses received by employees of firms given $5 Billion or more in taxpayer support. Here’s a Washington Post story explaining the Bill. The background is the outrage American voters and politicians felt at the bonuses paid to staff at [...]

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Times Newspapers v UK: libel on the interweb

March 17, 2009

Last week in Strasbourg, the Times lost its claim in the European Court of Human Rights that the way libel law in the UK applies to online newspaper archives breaches the right to freedom of expression under article 10 of the European Convention. The background to this is a libel case brought against the Times [...]

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A good day for Pakistan

March 16, 2009

I’m delighted that, finally, the Pakistani government has given way to pressure from lawyers and Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N party, and decided to reinstate the Chief Justice Iktikhar Chaudhry and the remaining handful of judges deposed by General Musharraf when he suspended the constitution in 2007. The government should have done this long ago: if it [...]

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Lord Lester’s Cohabitation Bill

March 13, 2009

I’m grateful to John Bolch at Family Lore for pointing out that Lord Lester’s Cohabitation Bill has its second reading in the Lords today. Lord Lester’s proposal, supported by Resolution, is aimed at protecting people who’ve lived together with a partner without getting married, and who are in hardship when they split up. The idea [...]

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Privacy: Max Mosley is right

March 11, 2009

Max Mosley appeared before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee yesterday to talk about the exposure of his private life by the News of the World last year, his successful privacy action and the law on privacy generally. Mosley argued that newspapers should be required, before publishing stories like his, to contact the subject of [...]

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Blawg Review #202

March 9, 2009

Blawg Review is the weekly blog carnival for law blogs – I’m pleased and honoured to be today’s host. The big legal news globally last week was the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. CCJHR Blog brought us the news, while at International [...]

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Solicitor General in blog comment shocker

March 5, 2009

Anna Raccoon and Dizzy have both expressed their surprise that the Solicitor General Vera Baird QC appears to have commented on Anna’s blog: she was correcting the fairly common belief that Lord Ahmed was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving. He was in fact convicted of dangerous driving, pure and simple. Just in case [...]

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Grabbing Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension

March 3, 2009

A lot’s being written and said on the airwaves this week about how lawyers are supposedly crawling over Sir Fred Goodwin’s exceedingly generous pension from RBS. Well, I’ll leave it to the pensions experts to speculate about whether his pension was discretionary and whether any attempt to stop his money under existing law could succeed. [...]

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