Recession Opportunity for Lawyers?

January 5, 2009

Blade is intrigued by a suggestion which wends its way from Australian journalist Evan Whitton, a columnist with the online legal journal Justinian.

Whitton is no shrinking violet when it comes to acerbic commentary on the legal profession. Indeed, anyone who has authored hard-hitting books such as Serial Liars: How Lawyers Get the Money and Get the Criminals Off and The Cartel: Lawyers and their Nine Magic Tricks wouldn’t necessarily be first on the list of those likely to proffer sympathetic advice for lawyers struggling thanks to the credit crunch.

serial-liars.gif

But Whitton is an astute observer whose apparent antipathy to lawyers lies less with their essence as human beings (for lawyers are, indeed, human beings) and rather more with his dislike of the adversarial legal system favoured by Britain, America and Australia. Whitton favours the truth-based system of many European countries, and this prompts him to write with the following hypothesis:

A truth-based system requires more judges and fewer lawyers.

I assume that in England no less than in Australia lawyers are being sacked out of hand because there is just no work.

Keynesian solution: change to a truth-based system and retrain the sacked lawyers as judges.

Now there’s a thought.

 

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From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.

Not so right said Fred

February 2, 2012
fred hat

So Farewell, then, Sir Fred Goodwin.

Now you are just Fred.

Not Right Said Fred, but plain Fred.

The Forfeiture Committee did for you.

No one had heard of it before,

But Dave said it had to act, and it did.

Trouble is that no one knows what to think.

Is it ‘Alas, poor Fred‘,

Or ‘Hurray! Sir Fred is dead!’?

We don’t know.

Do you?

By A. Mob, aged 1,378 and a half.