the voyage out

Texas forever.

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:50:23 +0100

Texas forever.

You can throw them out or keep them in your mason jars....

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:11:53 +0000

You can throw them out or keep them in your mason jars. I’ve come home

"I saw the best minds of my generation get jobs in the City."

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:26:10 +0000

“I saw the best minds of my generation get jobs in the City.”

Law geekery: Witness statements "in the witness's own words"

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 22:19:19 +0000

The second defendant, Mrs Morgan, was seeking to avoid liability to the claimant under a deed of indemnity. She had averred that the reason why her signature appeared on the deed was due to her former husband’s fraudulent actions and misrepresentations. The claimant applied for summary judgment and, in her evidence in reply, Mrs Morgan said that she had had the opportunity of studying the decision of the House of Lords in Barclays Bank plc v O’Brien [1984] in some detail. She made a number of points in reliance on that decision.

-Alex Lawrie Factors Ltd v Morgan, Morgan and Turner (1999) The Times, 18 August

(from Browne & Catlow’s Civil Litigation)

"Russell Brand: I want to ascend. I don’t want to be here for much longer, I mean, not talking..."

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 22:17:10 +0000

“

Russell Brand: I want to ascend. I don’t want to be here for much longer, I mean, not talking to you, you’re lovely and fantastic and it’s a thrill to talk to you, but I don’t want to dwell here with such trivial things for very much longer.

Jeremy Paxman: You mean you seek death?

”

"Ed Miliband has just provided his 17 month old son Daniel with a younger brother. Well, I say..."

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 15:03:00 +0000

“Ed Miliband has just provided his 17 month old son Daniel with a younger brother. Well, I say ‘younger brother’, I mean ‘deadly career rival.’”

- Jo Brand on Have I Got News For You, November 9 2010

Pride and Prejudice in Facebook updates

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 11:51:35 +0000

Pride and Prejudice in Facebook updates

Not Yet The Times

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 21:06:00 +0000

Grenouille v National Union of Seamen

A frog was a person in law and accordingly had the necessary locus standi to bring injunction proceedings before the courts, especially where the respondent was a wicked and irresponsible trade union. The Court of Appeal so held in allowing an appeal by Mr Grenouille, a frog, of Ball’s Pond, against a decision by Mr Justice Woolf refusing to grant an injunction restraining the National Union of Seamen from mounting a picket around the appellant’s pond.

Mr George Carman QC and Mr Douglas Hogg appeared for the frog. Mr Peter Taylor QC and Mr Fenton Bresler for the union.

THE MASTER OF THE ROLLS said that the appeal raised issues of profound importance to the rule of law. No less than the continued existence of the courts to protect citizens from oppression was at stake. The facts were simple. Mr Grenouille awoke one May morning to find his pond surrounded by pickets belonging to the National Union of Seamen. They were stopping the public from throwing food into the pond. The frog became ill. He was on the way to starvation. The National Association for Freedom, Enterprise, and Self-Reliance took up his case and last week, through counsel, asked a judge to order the union to remove the pickets. The union, in an affidavit to the court, said that the picket was lawful. It was “in furtherance of a trade dispute”, it claimed, the dispute being between Sandanista guerillas and the Nicaraguan government over working hours and conditions. The court had no doubt that the union’s action did not fall within the criteria laid down for a union to be able to claim immunity from an action in the courts.

But counsel for the union had persuaded the learned judge below that a frog had no legal right to be heard by the courts at all. Lord Denning said that he had no hesitation in adopting the opposite view. It would be a black day indeed for British justice if it were only available to brave men such as Mr John Gouriet and Sir Freddie Laker, and not to humble, law-abiding frogs. No one, however lowly, was below the law. It was the court’s duty to protect the weak against the strong. The decent member of the community- frog or human- who has fallen victim to injustice at the hands of dangerous, unchristian, wicked and irresponsible conglomerations of power, of which trade unions were, together with the Home Office, the main examples, must have the right to seek help from the courts, and the courts must offer a remedy. For them to do otherwise would be to betray those revered men who, so many centuries ago, gathered in that silent meadow at Runnymede. To those who said that frogs were beyond the law, the answer was that if frogs were beyond the law, then the rule of law existed no longer. He was in no doubt that this could not be so, and that frogs, for all legal purposes, were persons able to sue and be sued in the courts of Her Majesty.

It was true, Lord Denning said, that there were six decisions of the House of Lords which appeared to be dead against that proposition. He would pay little heed to them. They seemed to him to have been all wrongly decided, and it was settled law, at any rate in his court, that decisions of the House of Lords were not binding on the Court of Appeal. But even if he were obliged to follow precedent set by that House (and, it was fair to point out, some commentators took that view) he would have no difficulty in distinguishing that facts of the present case. None of the House of Lords cases relied on by counsel for the union referred specifically to the legal status of frogs. Their Lordships had simply not turned their minds to Ranidae, and it could not be assumed that the principles which governed the legal positions of horses, prawns and budgerigars would necessarily apply to the very different circumstances of the appellant. He could not see how Mr Grenouille’s case could be said to be analagous to the facts in Red Rum v Marks and Spencer Ltd [1979] AC 165 where the court had refused to allow Mr Rum, a horse, to sue for fees owed to him for opening the store’s Hampstead branch.

Lord Denning said that he had been conducting some researches and had found a case in point, supporting his view. It was a decision by the deputy magistrate of East Tonga (South Sea Reports, 1931-1958, p. 645) prohibiting the destruction of 5000 toads for use in a marriage ceremony. With the greatest respect to their noble Lordships, he found their reasoning less persuasive than that of the experienced Tongan magistrate.

LORD JUSTICE LAWTON said that although he had the greatest possible respect for the Master of the Rolls, he disagreed with everything he had said. Nevertheless he agreed that the appeal should be allowed. Trade unions ought to be restrained from actions which would result in anarchy and the inevitable breakdown of parliamentary democracy.

LORD JUSTICE EVELEIGH said that the law was under attack from a number of politically motivated groups.

Solicitors: Goodman Derrick & Co.; Kingsley Napley & Co.

(Satirical law report -published during a strike-induced hiatus in the publication of the Times- quoted in Lord Denning’s memoir The Family Story)

Law geekery

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:56:12 +0000

Law geekery:

Robert Patterson JR USDJ’s judgment in Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and J.K. Rowling v RDR Books.

My favourite line: “Es ist noch nicht zu spät, dich an der...

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:14:00 +0100

My favourite line: “Es ist noch nicht zu spät, dich an der Uni einzuschreiben”

(“There’s still time to apply to university!”)

“Anybody want to waste some time?”

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:59:23 +0100

“Anybody want to waste some time?”

From the Journal of Katherine Mansfield

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:51:00 +0100

‘On that occasion I began by telling him how dissatisfied I was with the idea that Life must be a lesser thing than we were capable of imagining it to be. I had the feeling that the same thing happened to nearly everybody whom I knew and whom I did not know. No sooner was their youth, with the little force and impetus characteristic of youth, done, then they stopped growing. At the very moment that one felt that now was the time to gather oneself together, to use one’s whole strength, to take control, to be an adult, in fact, they seemed content to swap the darling wish of their hearts for innumerable little wishes. Or the image that suggested itself to me was that of a river flowing away in countless little trickles over a dark swamp.

They deceived themselves, of course. They called this trickling away—greater tolerance—wider interests—a sense of proportion—so that work did not rule out the possibility of ‘life.’ Or they called it an escape from all this mind-probing and self-consciousness—a simpler and therefore a better way of life. But sooner or later, in literature at any rate, there sounded an undertone of deep regret. There was an uneasiness, a sense of frustration. One heard, one thought one heard, the cry that began to echo in one’s own being: “I have missed it. I have given up. This is not what I want. If this is all, then Life is not worth living.”’

(August 30, 1922)

Film: Il Divo

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:33:00 +0100

Halfway through this film I thought, “It’s really quite a coincidence that of the only two Italian films I’ve ever seen, both were centred around an extraordinarily expressionless middle-aged man with Mafia connections.” When the credits started rolling I realised it was the same actor, Toni Servillo, which shows that 1) I am an idiot, and 2) he must be quite an actor to be able to do “expressionless” a second time and create an almost unrecognisable character. The other film I was thinking of, The Consequences of Love, also had the same director, Paolo Sorrentino.

It was excellent, although I felt that it peaked when Giulio Andreotti (the Italian Prime Minister, played by Servillo) delivers an increasingly impassioned justification of his actions directly to the camera, possibly the only glimpse into his true thoughts in the film. For some reason I expected it to end soon after this high note, and so became slightly worried that the trial was going to be followed all the way to the verdict. Having said that, the film turned out to be quite short, only about 80 minutes. I was definitely hampered by my ignorance of Italian post-war politics- the summary of the main players at the beginning flashed past far too fast for me to make sense of all the names and acronyms. Although it was clear enough to someone as clueless as me, it seemed, justifiably, geared towards the fully informed domestic audience.

Unlike more concertedly realistic political “faction” films such as Primary Colors, Il Divo is low on expository dialogue, and really, exposition in general. It is more about creating an atmosphere, with the fall of the divine Julius presaged by other characters’ pronouncements, which are as faint as echoes. All gaps of fact and explanation are filled simply by Servillo’s face and his peculiar physicality- Andreotti is a cipher here; clues are offered to why he acted as he did but he ultimately remains enigmatic, not quite a villain. I found myself constantly scrutinising his expression in the hopes of understanding him- a completely fruitless endeavour.

It is an elliptical and abstract portrayal of a complex piece of political history, and provides an interesting comparison to recent films based on real events (particularly The Queen, although The Deal or W would probably be more appropriate I sadly haven’t seen either). While Primary Colors had a great script to support its realistic approach, personally I really didn’t care for The Queen- it seemed to illuminate nothing about a well-documented time everyone in the country remembered pretty well.

I would like, however, to see a film about the Blair years in the style of Il Divo- something which doesn’t trivialise that time (which is not easily explained) or force it into an easy narrative. On the other hand, recent British political history can’t really compete dramatically with the dubious glamour of the Mafia connection in Italian politics (Blair may have gone to war on false premises leading to the deaths of thousands, but that’s not quite the same thing as ordering the death of a journalist- in the film, I hasten to add, in real life Andreotti was acquitted). I was surprised and fascinated to learn just how far the Mafia penetrated into the echelons of power- by comparison it makes the Baltimore of The Wire seem positively untainted by corruption.

-Peter Bradshaw’s review

I been sittin' here just wastin' time...

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:06:00 +0000

…drinking, smoking, thinking, trying to free my mind…or possibly naming all 192 UN member states in ten minutes.

Current record: 6 minutes and 42 seconds.

“Steve, this debate is about religion, so let’s...

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:01:33 +0000

“Steve, this debate is about religion, so let’s discuss it rationally.”

Joe Biden: a rare clip of a politician being intentionally...

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:50:14 +0000

Joe Biden: a rare clip of a politician being intentionally funny.

Guardian Columnists: Tanya Gold

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:52:26 +0000

“At my college there were three tribes who all gaped at each other with mutual incomprehension. The first tribe was the Posh - the David Camerons and George Osbornes - who spent three years smiling with self-satisfaction. For them, Merton was just a big boarding school. In what passed for our sad little community, this tribe was rarely spotted. They didn’t deign to visit Planet Earth very often. They were at private dining clubs, or the Union, or hunting small animals with big guns, and dreaming of power. This entire system was designed for them and they didn’t even bother to turn up.”

Tanya Gold manages to write a column about Oxford which is somehow simultaneously both ridiculous nonsense and absolutely true

Best Facebook group ever: “David Cameron looks like Henry...

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:38:15 +0000

Best Facebook group ever: “David Cameron looks like Henry from Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”.

(Politics is srs bsns)

Return of the King: Theoden is way better than Aragorn at...

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:19:20 +0000

Return of the King: Theoden is way better than Aragorn at inspiring speeches, if considerably more pessimistic.

Criminal decontextualisation of the best scene in Casablanca,...

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:13:14 +0000

Criminal decontextualisation of the best scene in Casablanca, everyone should see this in the film first. But I wanted to post it for reference anyway.