Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

By skepticlawyer

As Legal Eagle, Deus Ex Macintosh and a couple of others know, I have three characters in this novel who are — to greater or lesser degrees — torturers. One of them also has an excellent sense of humour. I mean, the little shit’s actually outstandingly funny. I tried to change this early on in the piece, but when a character runs away on you, deciding to take the pen out of your hand and write himself, changing anything gets rather difficult.

With that in mind, here’s a song I’ve been playing whenever I’ve had to write his scenes.

Anonymous no more…

By Legal Eagle

I can’t believe there is a case called The Author of A Blog v Times Newspapers Limited [2009] EWHC 1358 (QB). But there is.

“The Author of A Blog” cited as the claimant was the pseudonymous author of a blog known as “Night Jack”. He was a police officer whose blog provided an inside view of police procedure, the seamy side of life and the law. In April this year, the Night Jack blog received the Orwell Prize for political blogging. However, after this, Patrick Foster, a journalist from the Times, determined to work out the identity of the blogger using internet research. Foster has justified his actions on the basis that the Night Jack blogger “was…using the blog to disclose detailed information about cases he had investigated, which could be traced back to real-life prosecutions.”

The blogger sought an interim injunction to restrain Times Newspapers Ltd from publishing any information that would identify him. Although an injunction was granted up until the time of judgment, the High Court ultimately refused the claimant’s application. The officer has been revealed to be Richard Horton, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary.

Counsel for Horton argued that The Times was not entitled to publish his private information on the basis of breach of confidence and an improper disclosure of private information pursuant to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Article 8 provides that “everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” Counsel submitted that The Times was subject to an enforceable duty of confidence not to reveal the blogger’s identity, or alternatively, that the blogger had a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of his identity, and there was no public interest justification for its publication.

Eady J said at para [7] that there was a two stage test for assessing whether Article 8 of the Convention had been breached. The first question was whether the claimant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to the information. The second question was whether there was a public interest which would justify overriding the right to privacy.

Eady J simply concluded at para [11] that Horton did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity.”

Even if there was a reasonable expectation of privacy, Eady J said that there was a public interest in overriding Horton’s right to privacy. Eady J accepted the argument of The Times that it was in the public interest to release information about the author, so as to enable the public to make an assessment of the weight and authority to be attached to them. He said at [21]:

… It is very often useful, in assessing the value of an opinion or argument, to know its source. …[O]ne may wish to apply greater caution or scepticism in the case of a person with “an axe to grind”. For so long as there is anonymity, it would obviously be difficult to make any such assessment. More generally, when making a judgment as to the value of comments made about police affairs by “insiders”, it may sometimes help to know how experienced or senior the commentator is.

Further, Eady J noted that Horton had sought to maintain his anonymity in order to avoid disciplinary proceedings. His Honour did not find this argument attractive, saying at [28]:

I do not accept that it is part of the court’s function to protect police officers who are, or think they may be, acting in breach of police discipline regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors (whose task it is to make judgments about such matters, at least in the first instance).

Horton has indeed been disciplined by Lancashire Constabulary in respect of his conduct, which released a statement saying:

The commentary in the blog is indeed the work of a serving Lancashire detective and clearly the views and opinions expressed are those of the author himself and not those of the wider Constabulary.

We have conducted a full internal investigation and the officer accepts that parts of his public commentary have fallen short of the standards of professional behaviour we expect of our police officers.

He has been spoken to regarding his professional behaviour and, in line with disciplinary procedures, has been issued with a written warning.

Night Jack has been taken off line. Horton has released a statement regretting his actions and the embarrassment it has caused Lancashire Constabulary.

I can’t help finding the action of The Times rather petty and malicious. For some reason, some journalists seem to despise blogging and bloggers (eg, an article in The Australian the other day to which I can’t even be bothered linking). There’s a suspicion in my mind that this journalist thought to himself, Let’s bring down a blogger who is writing something that is interesting and exciting. Jean Seaton, the director of the Orwell Prize, said:

… But, surely what matters is the accuracy and insight of the information. No one has disputed what this blog said: it was not illegal, it was not malicious. Indeed, in a world where local reporting is withering away as the economic model for supporting it disappears, we know less and less about our non-metropolitan selves and this lack of attention will surely lead to corruption. So this blog was a very good example of reporting bubbling up from a new place.

What is puzzling is the Times attack. The paper has made an intelligent use of blogs, and has been good at fighting the use of the courts to close down expression. NightJack was a source and a reporter. They would not (I hope) reveal their sources in court. Even odder is their main accusation against him: that the blog revealed material about identifiable court cases. The blog did not do this – cases were disguised. However, once the Times had published Horton’s name then, of course, it is easy to find the cases he was involved with. The Times has shut down a voice.

Blogs as a form are no more reliable or “true” than any other kind of journalism. That is why we started a blog prize – to try to help people to find the interesting ones. This decision damages our capacity to understand ourselves just when we need new forms to develop. After Tuesday’s ruling, would you blog about your workplace?

Tom Reynolds, author of Random Acts of Reality, a blog about working as a Emergency Medical Technician for the London Ambulance service, is scathing of the decision:

A lot of what bloggers bring to light is the chronic state of the their day to day life - a classic example would be police bloggers letting us know about how much administration that they must fill in whenever they make an arrest. Part of what I write about is to highlight the flaws in the governmental running of the NHS. Other bloggers do this more than me.

What bloggers do is humanise and explain their section of the world - public sector bodies do well to have bloggers writing within them, after all these are the people who care about what they do, about what improvements should be made and about where the faults come from. They highlight these things in the hopes that, in bringing this information into the public consciousness, they can effect a change that they would otherwise be powerless to bring about.

Anonymity provides a protection against vindictiveness from management who would rather do nothing than repeat the party-line, or lie, that everything is perfect, there is no cause for concern. Having seen management do, essentially illegal things, in order to persecute and victimise staff - anonymity is a way of protecting your mortgage payments.

It is not just for bloggers this protection of anonymity - consider a support forum for people with mental health problems, anonymity allows these user to perhaps be more open, more honest and more themselves then they would do were they forced to reveal their own identities. It is the nature of the internet that our identities are fluid.

…I’m mindful that a lot of exceptionally interesting, thought-provoking blogs might now come to an end. What is to stop companies and public bodies from hunting down people who may have been negative about them. What blogger, with bills to pay and mouths to feed, is now going to take the chance of lifting the lid on mismanagement, badly though policies or idiotic governmental decrees when there is the very real chance that their identities can be revealed for nothing more than a lurid headline on someone’s chip wrapper.

Why should bloggers put their careers at risk, over subjects that they are evangelical about, when the simpler, safer option is to fall back into the horde of people who grumble under their breath yet risk nothing to change things for the better. The world can then continue with less public scrutiny because people are scared to speak out.

The comments in British newspaper articles were overwhelmingly in support of Horton, who seems to have been seen as a credit to the Lancashire Constabulary by the public (no matter that he might have created red faces in the hierarchy because he hasn’t toed the “politically correct” line).

It’s worth remembering a warning in a previous post on divulging online information:

An online persona is an interesting thing - a reflection of the self in a very public forum. One of my old bosses used to say, “Never write anything in a file of which you’d be ashamed if it needed to be produced before the Court.” I tend to employ the same principle with regard to blogging…

Most of the time, I’m careful to say things which won’t embarrass me if they were brought to the attention of my employers or former employers, even though I’m pseudonymous. I guess you can’t take the lawyer out of the girl.

If bloggers want to remain anonymous, I think that should be respected. I can’t help feeling sorry for poor Horton. One of the things I really love about blogs is that they open up windows into different worlds for me (eg, Adrian the Cabbie’s blog). The blogosphere will be a less exciting place if those windows are closed. Perhaps the case was legally correct; perhaps not. But from the point of view of someone who is excited by the different options the blogosphere has to offer, it’s a sad development.

Right Dishonourable Members: STBO*

By DeusExMacintosh

Gofigure

Sir Christopher Kelly today accused MPs of exploiting their allowances for personal gain, as he opened his long-awaited inquiry into Commons expenses.

The chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life said that MPs appeared to lack principles, when they should have shown honesty and integrity.

“These values are timeless,” he said, at the start of the committee’s first evidence session. “If they had been followed more by more MPs over the past few years we would not be in the situation that we are.”

- Times Online

* stating the bleeding obvious

‘These are the days of miracle and wonder’

By skepticlawyer

A few thoughts occasioned by our fighting over abortion and law, abortion and terror, abortion and Christianity, abortion and rights. They are scattered thoughts, alas. These debates do not bring out the best in us.

As I wrote it I was listening to War of the Worlds. Go figure.

1. When my parents married, my father refused to convert to Catholicism (he was a diffident Protestant, although he had very little time for any of it). This meant my parents married ‘behind the altar’, and that when the priest came to visit my mother and my newborn older sister, he told my mother that my sister was a heathen who would burn in Hell. My father heard it and decked the priest.

2.  Are you a cattle-tick or a proddy-dog? Protestant, protestant ring the bell, protestant, protestant go to hell! Catholic dogs — leap like frogs — in and out of the waaaater!

3. It was a slow day
And the sun was beating on the soldiers
By the side of the road 
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

4. When the Roman historian Tacitus wrote his account of the great fire of Rome in AD64, he gave the first account of the early Christians, who — among other things — Nero recycled as firelighters in his gardens. No friend of Nero, when Tacitus came to describe the early Christians, he accused them of ‘hatred of the human race’.

5. When it came to religious education, the primary school didn’t know what to do with me, not with a ‘mixed marriage’ like that. I was told I’d have to sit out. I wanted to run around the oval instead of RE (I was that sort of child), but when I was told I’d have to sit quietly and read, I suggested that I spend each week in a different religious education class, even the Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and — shock horror — pagans. Well, it was the 70s.

6. The school — perhaps flummoxed by my request — acceded to it. I learnt a lot in a short space.

7. Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives– 
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side 
Like an outdated combine harvester, 
And everyone young going down the long slide 

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if 
Anyone looked at me, forty years back, 
And thought, That’ll be the life; 
No God any more, or sweating in the dark 

About hell and that, or having to hide 
What you think of the priest. He 
And his lot will all go down the long slide 
Like free bloody birds.

8. In 197 AD, the early Christian writer Tertullian wrote an Apologia for his Christian faith. There had been a spate of persecutions in his home city of Carthage. There’d been the usual Roman response to the Christian refusal to partake in Roman civil religionChristians to the lions!, although Christian criticism of the religious practices of the Roman Governor’s wife provoked a distinctive response from her. A devotee of Aphrodite, she had joined during a festival in a rite involving sexual celebration in the Goddess’ temple. This involved priests and priestesses and devotees dancing on the temple forecourt and pulling chosen revellers from the crowd by the hand — ‘like Bruce Springsteen in the clip to Dancing in the Dark‘, as one classicist friend puts it — and taking them inside for a very good time. Christians called the Governor’s wife a whore; pagans did not understand what the Christians were going on about. Her response was to send one of the Christian women to the Temple of Aphrodite instead of to the lions.

9. When I see a couple of kids 
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s 
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, 
I know this is paradise 

10. Civil religion and monotheism do not get on well: witness the tussle over God, the Bible, the Flag, the military, the schools etc in the United States. To appreciate the Roman angst over Christian failure to partake in civic observances, recall the silliness that attended Barack Obama’s occasional failure to wear a flag pin on his lapel, or to put his hand over his heart when the Pledge was recited (this last practice was identical in the Roman world). Now multiply that hysteria by several orders of magnitude.

11. The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry

12. ‘Too many Christians, not enough lions’: graffito outside several amphitheatres in the Roman world, now popular among people with, ahem, a rather grim sense of humour.

13. I divided my time between Italy and the UK for most of 1996, and at one point had to make an unplanned visit to the UK end. The trip was urgent — I had business dealings to attend to — and I booked a flight that took me into Luton. I’d have preferred Heathrow or Gatwick, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. I arrived on June 17, shortly after this incident. I made the mistake of pulling the ‘greenie’ out of my pocket and showing it to the Sikh behind the counter.

14. I spent four hours in detention. This included a strip search. I was told we tend to know you people by the company you keep

15. I have never renewed my Irish passport.  

16. In his Apologia, Tertullian is writing for his fellow Christians: his is not a piece to cajole or persuade his enemies. He cheerfully insults everything pagan, in so doing revealing a great deal about himself (sexual hangups, natch) and about pagan religious practices (superficially sexually liberal, but actually highly managed). It’s a very revealing document. The most interesting section is his account of how otherwise sober and restrained Romans of both sexes would ‘break’ during festivals and appear to throw any morality out the window. 

On these grounds then the Christians are regarded as public enemies, because they do not offer to the emperors either useless or lying or ill-advised honours. Men of true religion celebrate even their regular festivals conscientiously rather than wantonly. It is thus made an important duty, to bring out hearths and couches into the public street, to feast community by community, to recreate the city under the guise of a tavern, to produce mud by wine [a reference to libation], to run about in crowds for the enjoyment of outrages, insults and incitements to lust. Is it thus that public joy is expressed by public disgrace? Why does such behaviour become the festal days of emperors, but does not befit other days? Shall those who observe order out of regard to Caesar, abandon it on account of Caesar, and shall loyalty grant a licence for immorality, and religion give occasion to indulgence? 

17. Anthropology can explain this practice, and its fundamental importance in maintaining social order: the festival represents entry into a liminal state, where normal social rules are upended for a period of time. In a seminal paper on liminality, anthropologist Victor Turner describes similar practices across a range of pagan/animist/tribal/polytheistic cultures. The practice has been largely obliterated by the monotheistic faiths, although many Latin-inflected cultures retain something of the old Roman carnivale and combine it with left over practices from Aztec or Inca peoples.

18. Monotheism counsels moral perfection, but we cannot be perfect. So we break. And we break each in our own way, in our own private hell, consumed by guilt as we break and punished by our monotheism for breaking. Tertullian rails at the queues of Roman women at the gates of the abortionist after their festivals, making an argument with a modern and familiar ring:

But to us, to whom homicide has been always forbidden, it is not permitted to break up even what has been conceived in the womb, while as yet the blood is being drawn (from the parent body) for a human life. Abortion is premature murder, and it makes no difference whether it is a life already born that one snatches away [Romans usually killed the physically disabled at birth], or a life in the act of being born that one destroys; that which is to be a human being is also human. The whole fruit is already present in the seed.

19. Medicine is magical and magical is art
We’ve got the boy in the bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

20. Tertullian records that pagans considered Christians enemies of the free market. 

21. Having lost both pagan liminality and monotheistic morality and retained only the latter’s guilt, we scrabble over the bones of religion all the while the free market cannibalizes the lot, repackages it and makes it both shiny and meaningless: This is what scientologists actually believe.

22. And immediately 
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: 
The sun-comprehending glass, 
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows 
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

[Poetry by Philip Larkin and Paul Simon]

UPDATE: Pavlov’s Cat on a related theme.

Home Grown

By DeusExMacintosh

selectivetermination2

From Little Green Footballs:

As we noted last Sunday, when murder suspect Scott Roeder was arrested, the phone number of Operation Rescue was discovered on a Post-It note in his car.

Now it turns out that this wasn’t just the phone number of the Operation Rescue office, but of a specific person: Cheryl Sullenger, the senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue — who was herself convicted in 1988 of conspiring to bomb a California abortion clinic, and served two years in prison.

Sullenger’s name even appears on the Operation Rescue press release about the murder of Dr. George Tiller.

So now we learn that one of the senior officials for Operation Rescue (who are spinning like crazy to portray themselves as a non-extremist group with no connections to violence or to Scott Roeder) is a convicted felon in an abortion clinic bombing plot. Isn’t that lovely?

It’s going to be a little harder to convince people that the perp is a lone gunman when one of your organisation’s three authorised spokespeople has been acting as a spotter for the sniper.

Having had some time to think about it, the murder of Dr Tiller is starting to look more and more like terrorism. I wouldn’t for a moment compare the planned assassination of a single surgeon to the massed Islamist spectaculars that apply massive explosions to crowded flesh, or airplanes to architecture. Whilst the motivating factors for both examples are roughly based in religion, the damage being done by the ‘pro-lifers’ (not all life obviously, just some life) follows a model of harassment, assaults and murder that has more in common with the activities of animal rights activists. Yes, all three can be properly described as terrorism as one of the major motivations of all these campaigns is to frighten opponents into submission, but the targets of pro-life and animal rights tend to be more specific.

As an Oxford University student, Skepticlawyer has had a front row seat while protestors have attempted to stop the construction of a new animal research laboratory they’d already prevented being built at rival Cambridge University. No one has yet been killed by animal rights people (though there have been a couple of beatings that verged on attempted murder and they do use firebombs). Perhaps the most positive legacy of Dr Tiller’s assassination is that US authorities will have to re-think their response in similar ways and be forced to acknowlege that the pro-lifers can pose a serious threat.

British police have only recently begun to realise that domestic terrorism (non-islamic) needed to be taken much more seriously and major changes to the law have been required to give victims appropriate protection. Significantly, however, successful prosecutions against animal rights campaigners have been for traditional criminal offenses (blackmail and arson) without recourse to the newer ‘anti-terrorist’ powers.

Violent anti-abortion protests in the US were successfully curtailed for many years in the 80s and 90s using the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act and patient access was supposedly guaranteed by the Freedom of Access to Clinical Entrances (FACE) Act in 1994 which makes offenses against abortion premises a federal matter. Subsequent supreme court challenges have used the First Amendment to undermine the application of RICO powers and as this MSNBC video points out, the actual effectiveness of FACE is entirely reliant on the willingness of the current Federal Administration to mount prosecutions.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

With the recent news that an elderly white supremacist has killed a security guard in an attack on the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, Dave Bath raised an interesting question @148 on the Selective Termination thread.

NOW the compare and contrast between the murders of Johns and Tiller gets interesting.

“Joseph Persichini, assistant director in charge of the Washington FBI field office, said the shooting was being investigated as a possible hate crime or a case of domestic terrorism.”

Does anybody know if the murderer of Tiller is being investigated in a similar manner, or if there are politically-motivated kid gloves being used? And what of the press in the US?

Good question. Answers anybody?

There are only 7 plots…

By skepticlawyer

… And all of ‘em are in Homer.

Well, that’s the story, anyway. Sometimes the magic number is eleven. Sometimes the magic number is three. Sometimes it’s something else. Sometimes Virgil gets a look-in, but usually Homer gets the blame for the sum total of basic plotlines in Western Literature. I used to think this assertion was so much eyewash, but having spent a depressing few months reading a great deal of contemporary (and not so contemporary) fiction, I’m starting to agree that there aren’t that many different plots.

Similarly, I’m also starting to think that writers who stray outside those basic plots — unless they’re a genius — are apt to produce bad writing. Since I’m writing at the moment, this is something I’m keen to avoid. My view has always been that to write well, you need to read widely, especially in the areas that inspire your own writing. For the book I’m doing now, I’ve revisited Swift (A Modest Proposal is on the electronic equivalent of speed dial) and have been dining out on science fiction, speculative fiction and steampunk (I highly recommend Perdido Street Station, by the way). That said, I tend to read pretty omnivorously when writing, and this book has also required some time in the company of Adam Smith and David Hume as well as the New Testament, the Gnostic Gospels, Lucretius and Catullus.

Unfortunately, my usual plan to read lots of recent literary fiction has pretty much stalled. This is because every second work of literary fiction I pick up seems to be one of the following: 

(a) Bad magic realism

(b) Bad Jane Austen

(c) People working out their childhood shit

(d) People obsessed with the more boring aspects of women’s lives, as though writing about it obsessively will somehow make it less boring.

One of the above is coupled (almost inevitably) with excruciating dialogue and an utter failure to plot convincingly. It is dreadful and very unpleasant to wade through.

I was beginning to worry that a tendency to engage in (e) all of the above was spreading and so spent some time in the genre fiction sections. This is in Blackwell’s, by the way, the bookshop in Oxford with umpteen miles of shelving. I don’t want for reading material that is both (a) plentiful and (b) cheap.

To my delight, I found that crime writers can still — for the most part — create proper tension. Erotic writers can still do sex scenes. War and science fiction get their technology right (although the latter are still sometimes afflicted with excruciating dialogue) and often do interesting things with it. Writers of police procedurals and courtroom dramas can be very good, especially if they have taken the time to get the police procedure/law correct.

Sometimes a literary writer can take a genre (thriller, often) and really do something with it. The best book I’ve read in the last three years is Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin: nothing (including the narrator) is quite what it seems, and the ending is overwhelming because so well concealed.

Most of the time, however, there is no attempt to engage with genre fiction and literary authors flounder about with boring stories derived largely from their own experience. Now this ‘only write what you know’ caper is the biggest bloody furphy in literature and I’m going to explode it right now.

Robert Heinlein never travelled to the moon. Harper Lee was never a lawyer. P.D James is not a copper. Lionel Shriver is not a school shooter. Bret Easton Ellis…

You get my point.

Writing well requires thought and insight, not deep knowledge of the inner workings of the Queensland Criminal Code (or whatever it is). If there is a rule, it is this: first tell your story, then worry about all the bells and whistles to make it ‘authentic’. If you strive for authenticity first, you will produce a pale imitation of literature, and your characters will never live.

This seems to be a lesson too many literary writers fail to learn, perhaps out of a misplaced sense of politeness to the groups they seek to represent in fiction. Feeling that they should not speak for those who are unlike themselves, they speak only about people like themselves. And because most writers are white, middle-class and female, the result is slightly less interesting than navel fluff collecting.

After my last run-in with people who take this sort of slipshod argument seriously, I swore off historical fiction. First time around, I went to some trouble to make my characters ‘true’ to their time: nasty, poor, brutish and — in their case, having been recruited into the Waffen-SS — tall. It seems, however, that authors would rather live with a lie when it comes to historical fiction. This produces ridiculous effects like Medieval nuns sounding like nineteenth century liberals (or, if the author is American, like 20th century American liberals). It is utterly nauseating and evidence of the worst sort of contempt for both history and literature.

As you all know, this time I’m doing spec-fic with roots in a historical period about which I know a great deal. Since I refuse to write historical fiction, I’ve been freed to ask some odder questions. Some of these have interesting answers, while some of these have boring (or at least pointless) answers. Often, I don’t know what I’ll get when I ask the question and start working my ideas through, but the exercise is a bunch of fun. And it produces characters that are fully, grubbily alive — which is all you can ask for, really.

And trust me on the seven plots. There ain’t no more.

Right Dishonourable Members: Will the last minister to leave, please turn off the lights

By DeusExMacintosh

jamespurnell

James Purnell the work and pensions secretary, last night dealt a monumental blow to Gordon Brown’s chances of holding onto office when he dramatically announced he was quitting the cabinet and asking Brown “to stand aside to give Labour a fighting chance of winning the next election”.

His statement, in effect declaring Brown unelectable, will further weaken the prime minister’s waning authority and takes the challenge to his leadership to a dangerous level.

Purnell made his sensational move after polls closed in the local and European elections - in which Labour was subsequently decimated across the board, informing Brown by phone last night. It prompted a furious reaction in Number 10 with ministers saying Purnell was profoundly mistaken.

Brown had no inkling that Purnell was going to quit, since the work and pensions secretary shrouded his move in secrecy in order to prevent No 10 mounting a pre-emptive strike against him, or seeking to challenge his motives…

No 10 said it was disappointed Purnell had chosen to tell newspapers before telling the leader of the Labour party.

- The Guardian

A cunning plan…

By Legal Eagle

I’m not a fan of the reality TV genre. It’s lazy television. It makes me want to come out in hives half the time. How can people embarrass themselves like that?

It looks like reality TV might be going the way of the dodo in France. A French court has ruled that being a reality TV contestant is a job which should have all the conditions which come with employment:

The case was brought by Anthony Brocheton, Marie Adamiak and Arno Laize, who said that their participation in l’Ile de la Tentation amounted to a job in terms of French labour laws, which stipulate that no one can be made to work more than 35 hours a week.

The program involves scantily clad men and women testing the faithfulness of competing couples with massages, dances and beach walks on an island off Tulum on the Mexican coast.

Giving judgment, la Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court, said: “Temptation Island constitutes a job and therefore justifies an employment contract.”

It backed a decision by a lower tribunal to award the three contestants €8,176 each in overtime, on the grounds that they had worked for 24 hours a day.

Glem, the French group that makes Temptation Island for the private TF1 channel, was also ordered to pay the contestants €817 for not being given a holiday, €500 for unfair dismissal and €1,500 for the wrongful termination of their contracts. Lawyers said Glem is likely to be ordered to pay the claimants’ legal fees as well.

The supreme court upheld the lower tribunal judgment, which said: “Tempting a person of the opposite sex requires concentration and attention.”

(I think the last line is my absolute favourite. Seduction as a vocation profession.)

Various former contestants of l’Ile de la Tentation and other reality TV contestants are set to sue for back pay and other employment benefits. It looks like it’s the death knell for cheap and lazy TV in France now that they actually have to pay the contestants.

So, to improve Australian TV, my cunning plan is to become a reality TV contestant, and then try to establish that I am entitled to an employment contract. Hey, I’ll make money and do a service for the Australian television watching public. The only question is which TV show would have me. I’m not sure that the kind of things which interest me are the kind of things which appeal to the general public. Anyone else fascinated by corrective justice and private law? Anyone? Anyone?!? It’s a sad life when you’re a nerd…

Update:

In comments below, I made the tongue in cheek suggestion that there could be a show named “Solicitation Island“. A German friend tells me there already has been a show like this in Germany. They had a hugely successful series featuring made-up court cases, where the accused was an actor, and was put through ‘normal’ court proceedings, involving actual solicitors, barristers and judges.

I think this would be a great idea to enable people to understand the fundamentals of legal procedure better. Although I usually don’t like reality TV, I hate legal TV dramas, and think it would be really good to show people what court is really like.

MONDAY FUNNIES: Selective Termination

By DeusExMacintosh

selectivetermiation1

selectivetermination2

A prominent US abortion doctor has been shot dead at a church in the city of Wichita, Kansas.

Dr George Tiller, one of the few US doctors who performed late-term abortions, had been vilified by anti-abortionists in the US. The gunman fled in a car, but officials say a suspect is now in custody. US Attorney General Eric Holder said the US would offer protection to “appropriate people and facilities” in the wake of Dr Tillers’ killing.

Dr Tiller’s clinic - called Women’s Health Care Services - had often been the site of demonstrations, and he had been shot and wounded by an assailant 16 years ago. Questioning of the suspect, a 51 year-old man, is continuing. Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said he was likely to face one charge of murder and two counts of aggravated assault for allegedly pointing a gun at two other men.

Dr Tiller, who was 67, was shot just after 1000 (1500 GMT) at the Reformation Lutheran Church. His lawyer, Dan Monnat, said his client was killed while serving as an usher during a morning church service. His wife was in the choir at the time.

- BBC News

H/T to Hoyden About Town

UPDATE: 11/6/09.

selectivetermination2

From Little Green Footballs:

As we noted last Sunday, when murder suspect Scott Roeder was arrested, the phone number of Operation Rescue was discovered on a Post-It note in his car.

Now it turns out that this wasn’t just the phone number of the Operation Rescue office, but of a specific person: Cheryl Sullenger, the senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue — who was herself convicted in 1988 of conspiring to bomb a California abortion clinic, and served two years in prison.

Sullenger’s name even appears on the Operation Rescue press release about the murder of Dr. George Tiller.

So now we learn that one of the senior officials for Operation Rescue (who are spinning like crazy to portray themselves as a non-extremist group with no connections to violence or to Scott Roeder) is a convicted felon in an abortion clinic bombing plot. Isn’t that lovely?

It’s going to be a little harder to convince people that Scott Roeder is a lone gunman when one of your organisation’s three authorised spokespeople has been acting as a spotter for the sniper.

Predictably enough…

By Legal Eagle

President Obama has appointed Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court to replace David Souter. Predictably enough, elements in the Republican Party have questioned her appointment. The criticisms are not of her gender and ethnicity per se, but of certain comments she made at a talk in 2001 about the gender and ethnicity of judges:

Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, and Karl Rove, George Bush’s chief strategist, have called Ms Sotomayor “racist” and said she should withdraw as a nominee over comments she made in 2001.

In a talk at the University of California, she offered the view that a female Hispanic judge would better understand certain issues around race and gender than a white male.

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said.

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

As discussed in my previous post on the lead-up to Ms Sotomayor’s appointment, difficulties arise when diversity becomes a specific criterion for appointment, because suddenly gender, ethnicity and sexuality of appointees become open to attack. On the other hand, I do think diversity in the ranks of the judiciary is a Good Thing because justice looks more impartial if there is a range of different people who do the judging, not just a particular cadre of individuals of a particular gender, ethnicity, religion or sexuality.

Despite my support of a diverse judiciary, I am really wary of claims that women, members of ethnic or religious minorities or non-heterosexual judges are necessarily better than others. In fact, sometimes I think there’s an assumption that just because a person is a member of a minority group this means that person is a better or more worthy person. Not so. It can give you insight in what it is like to be marginalised or disempowered, and make you want to strive for greater justice and equality in society, but this is not a fait accompli. Equally well, a person from a non-minority group may equally well wish to strive for greater justice and equality in society, just because that person is fundamentally decent.

Some of my worst experiences of discrimination in the workplace on the basis of my gender or my choices with respect to childbearing have been at the hands of other women. I had foolishly thought these women would be on my side because they had children and knew what it was like to juggle everything. No. Their experience of struggle and adversity had just made them harder and more unforgiving of others: I managed to do it without help, why should this woman be any different?

As I’ve explained before in relation to arguments that women make better judges, I do think women generally think differently to men. Of course one’s religion, ethnicity, sexuality, upbringing and class all contribute to one’s view of the world and the way in which one judges others. This doesn’t mean a person’s judgment is necessarily better, it’s just different. But that different perspective more truly reflects the society we have (which is made up of an enormous variety of people).

So Justice Sotomayor is not necessarily better than a white man at being a judge. She’s just different. But that difference is a good thing in itself because there is more chance of a fair outcome if diverse opinions are sought from a range of society.