All articles by Michael Cross – Page 117
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News
Maggie Maggie Maggie! In in in!
The last time I was in the same room as Margaret Thatcher, several hundred Japanese businessmen were there, too. It was Tokyo, September 1989, the high noon of Japan's economic power. World leaders were passing through every week to pay homage to the yen, but prime minister Thatcher was different. ...
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News
Iraq: fragile justice
Nearly 10 years after regime change, seven years since the first democratic elections and despite several billion dollars worth of targeted aid, the rule of law in Iraq ranges from fragile to non-existent. In one of the first tests of Europe’s Common Security and Defence Policy, a small and little-known ...
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News
Fear and loathing in libel reform
To put it mildly, this is not a good time for politicians to be seen doing favours for media proprietors. Yet this is inevitably how the upcoming debate on libel reform - expected to be kicked off with a bill in the Queen’s speech in May - is going to ...
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News
What the election result will mean for the legal profession
Unless they are unusually concentrated in marginal constituencies, the votes of UK solicitors are unlikely to swing the outcome of the general election in three weeks’ time. However, the main parties’ manifestos have much to say about the law (especially where it relates to crime, human rights and civil liberty), ...
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News
Hopes rise for legal services in EU-US free trade deal
Free trade talks between the EU and US are almost certain to end with agreement freeing up the movement of lawyers, a leading European figure in the campaign to remove barriers has predicted. Louis-Bernard Buchman, chair of the International Legal Services committee of the Council of Bars and Law Societies ...
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News
Cry freedom of information
The eyes of the news media have been elsewhere, but the House of Commons justice committee has just restated an important constitutional principle: freedom of information is a good thing. A long-awaited post-legislative review of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 concludes: ‘We do not believe that there has been ...
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News
Cool reaction to European patent unification
Leading intellectual property lawyers in the UK have reacted coolly to the unitary patent and unified patent court process approved by the European parliament on Tuesday. ‘No one can doubt that having a single system is, in principle, a good idea,’ said Claire Bennett, partner in international firm DLA Piper's ...
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News
A swift and sure way to computer disaster
Here we go again. Just two years after a new government promised to break with Labour’s record of IT-based policy fiascoes, along comes a high-profile public policy reform which looks set to go down the same dismal road. The success of the revolution set out in the Swift and Sure ...
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News
Opportunities in Colombia
Colombia: isn’t it a bit dicey? Lawyers in Latin America’s fourth-largest economy and deepest-rooted democracy could be forgiven for showing irritation at the inevitable question. Invariably, the reply is ‘things have changed’.
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News
Chilling effect
As a media legal scandal, it didn’t amount to much: no superinjunctions, celebrities or retired police horses. But my one (so far - touch wood) experience of being sued for defamation as a journalist illustrates an important shortcoming of the government’s current proposals for libel reform.
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NewsLord chancellor takes a constitutional in the Lords
The first question Chris Grayling had to field before the House of Lords’ formidable Constitution Committee yesterday looked like an easy toss: would he prefer to be addressed secretary of state or lord chancellor?
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News
Can’t stand newspapers? Then stand up for a free press
Every collector of modern quotations knows Tom Stoppard’s: ‘I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.’ Probably most of us would agree. What’s less well known is the context of the quote, perhaps because the play from which it comes, Night and Day (1978*), now ...
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News
Cold called
To be honest, I knew I was asking for trouble by picking up the phone at teatime. The only calls that come through on that particular landline are from investment advisers or chaps asking for my passwords so they can fix my IT. Sure enough, when I picked up the ...
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Feature
Could the iPad revolutionise the way law firms do business?
Like several thousand other people, Lee Ranson, managing partner at Eversheds, bought an Apple iPad on 28 May, the day it went on sale. ‘We were converts,’ he says. Unlike many proud early owners, however, he saw the much-talked-about handheld computer not as an executive toy, but as a key ...
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News
Bring out your dead
If 200 people in England and Wales dropped dead one week from a mysterious unknown cause, you’d think our supposedly nanny state would learn about it right away.
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News
Tarzan and the briefs
In his heyday, Michael ‘Tarzan’ Heseltine MP was renowned for finding the G-spot of the Conservative Party. This week, Lord Heseltine of Thenford seems to have worked the trick across the political spectrum. Whatever the likelihood of it being implemented, his ‘No Stone Unturned in Pursuit of Growth’ report brought ...