September 2, 2010 – 1:51 pm
When I was learning how to drive, my father asked me what kind of car my instructor had. “A white one?” I hazarded. He was just horrified that I had no idea of the make or how many cylinders it had. I’m not a petrol head — cars are simply a tool for getting around [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Law, Popular culture, Restitution
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Tagged breach of confidentiality, breach of contract, confidentiality, contract, disgorgement, disgorgement damages, Popular culture, television, The Stig, Top Gear
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September 1, 2010 – 11:07 am
For the moment anyway. Yes. I’ve handed in my PhD thesis. I can’t quite believe it: my hands and knees are shaking. Now I’ve just got to hope that the examiners have mercy on it. I put a special part in my acknowledgements for my two co-bloggers and for the regular commenters on this blog [...]
I’m back to teaching, which is nice. I like teaching. But there’s one thing I’d forgotten about: the obligatory query as to where my Powerpoint slides can be downloaded from the web. What Powerpoint slides? Long term readers of the blog know that I have problems with Powerpoint from way back. “Powerpoint is against my [...]
Eye-candy du jour, for the inner science geek. This is the extraordinary place where we all live – the Universe. The picture is the first full-sky image from Europe’s Planck telescope which was sent into space last year to survey the “oldest light” in the cosmos. It took the 600m-euro observatory just over six months [...]
The appointment of judges in the common law adversarial system is always a controversial issue. There is a tendency for governments to choose appointments who are perceived as sympathetic to their political cause. This tendency is not confined to the more progressive governments, either, despite the fact that howls of “tokenism” seem to be louder [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Law, Politics, Public Policy, Society
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Tagged appointment of judges, Bernard Teague, Clarence Thomas, confirmation hearing, courts, Elena Kagan, Ian Callinan, judges, judiciary, Marcia Neave, partisan appointments, SCOTUS, sonia sotomayor, Supreme Court, Supreme Court of Victoria, United States, Victorian Court of Appeal
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“Book-love, I say again, lasts throughout life, it never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy forever.” (Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania) How can one judge how much one loves a book when one also loves the author? This question has been raised by the recent debacle in which an anonymous [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Books, England, History, Internet, Law, Literature, Media, Society
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Tagged Amazon, anonymous reviews, book reviews, history books, Orlando Figes, Rachel Polonsky, Stephanie Palmer
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January 21, 2010 – 8:36 pm
Via a friend, I came across this interesting piece on political correctness on US university campuses. The author starts out with a salutary tale: In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Australian internet filter, Education, Free Speech, Human/Civil rights, Literature, Personal liberty, Politics, Society
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Tagged Free Speech, manners, political correctness, regulation, respect agenda, respect ambassadors, universities
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December 21, 2009 – 6:11 am
I’ve just read The Pin Striped Prison by Lisa Pryor (2008, Picador, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney). Pryor was a law student who now works as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. Pryor is exploring a number of questions: what drives young people to want to become lawyers? Why do many lawyers decide it is [...]
December 7, 2009 – 9:46 am
I went to an interesting seminar the other day on breach of confidence law. The seminar included a number of speakers and spanned Australian, UK and US law on the subject, as well as a historical consideration of the piecemeal manner in which breach of confidence law developed. Apparently breach of confidence was a relative [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Equity, Free Speech, Intellectual property, Law, Media, Privacy, Public Policy
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Tagged breach of confidence, breach of privacy, European Convention on Human Rights, giller v procopets, max mosely
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November 30, 2009 – 9:50 pm
I haven’t been about much for a number of reasons, the principle of which is that I agreed to mark some law exams for a colleague, and they’re due back on Thursday. There’s a tight turn around, so I’m finding I have to average around 10 papers a day to keep up with my schedule. [...]
