All News articles – Page 1788
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News
China – a dilemma
China admits to having executed 1,718 of its citizens in 2008, according to a report just published by Amnesty International. That’s 72% of the 2,390 executions recorded worldwide.
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Journalists in family courts
At a rough guess, of the 150-odd people who packed out Chancery Lane’s reading room last night to discuss the Ministry of Justice’s plans to admit journalists into family courts, 149 think it a bad idea. And the one who is in principle in favour (me) has strong reservations about ...
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The state we’re in
So there you have it. MPs have voted in favour of holding some inquests in secret, after a string of heavily spun ‘concessions’ from the government. This is either another nail in the coffin of a free society or a matter of supreme indifference to all but a self-selecting cadre ...
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Does your firm need a viral ad?
I knew the Arctic Monkeys had gone utterly mainstream the morning I heard a package on their success via online word-of-mouth marketing on Radio 4’s Today programme.
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Show us the proof government can handle our data legally
A study commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform trust has lobbed a legal hand grenade into the government’s stated ambition to look after us better with the help of bigger and more joined up computer databases. According to the report, the Database State, nearly a quarter of the government’s biggest ...
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Calm down dear, it’s only a new world of conversations
It seems that so far our brave new world for the Gazette, of blogging and user commenting, is working a treat – our visitor numbers are up and people are reading for longer and seeing more pages when they turn up.
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Let Lord Laming have his way
Surely it should be obvious that if you put up the cost of something you put people off buying it? Economists see this as the absolute basis of economics – the use of incentives to deter and encourage. How Whitehall, then, thought making child care cases up to 2,500% more ...
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Balance sheets, waste technology and Formula 1
On the button: City firm Taylor Wessing advised Ross Brawn, former boss of the Honda GP Formula 1 motorsport team, on buying the Honda team to create Brawn GP F1. The new team has taken on Honda’s drivers from last year, Britain’s Jenson ...
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First ABSs expected by 2011
The first alternative business structures should open for business in 2011, the chief executive of the Legal Services Board predicted last week. Chris Kenny told the Association of Law Costs Draftsmen’s annual conference in Harrogate that the recession would encourage new ventures.
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Murder conviction quashed after 27 years
A man who has spent the last 27 years in prison had his conviction for rape and murder quashed by the Court of Appeal today (18 March). Sean Hodgson, now 57, was given a life sentence in 1982 for the murder of barmaid Teresa de Simone, ...
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Court actions soar over bad debts
Top corporate firms are increasingly resorting to court action to secure unpaid legal fees, the Gazette has learned. In the past six months, the number of cases filed in the Queen’s Bench division of the High Court between top-50 firms and clients has more than doubled, ...
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Free movement of people and adopting EU provisions
To be free or not to be – that is the question for the UK government as it continues to struggle to implement the free movement of people provision, some 50 years after the establishment of the EU.
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Age-old concern
Joyce Glasser’s letter about students and newly qualifieds in their late-30s or 40s and 50s, captured the situation in a nutshell (see [2009] Gazette, 19 February, 11). I am a newly qualified solicitor who was also made redundant on qualification due to organisational structure changes.
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Mr Grumpy piles on the agony
Judges don’t always have it their own way, writes John Moore, of Dixon & Templeton in Hampshire. When Moore started articles in 1959, he recalls sitting in a Court of Quarter Sessions presided over by a terrifying recorder whose demeanour suggested the possibility of suffering ‘a recurring and somewhat unpleasant ...
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Jack Straw and legal aid
Let us be grateful to the lord chancellor at least for his frank warning that lawyers dependent on state funding would be ‘wise to reconsider’ their expectations of earnings (see [2009] Gazette, 12 March, 1).
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Legal aid lawyers are paying the price for economic disaster
The principal lesson of the financial crash – that markets are not always the best solution for all areas of society – appears lost on Jack Straw (see [2009] Gazette, 12 March, 1). As trillions of pounds are thrown at banks, it seems that legal aid practitioners must pay the ...
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Tories consider private solution to legal aid shortfall
A future Conservative government may look to the private sector to top up the legal aid budget, the Gazette has learned. Tory policymakers are considering how the UK’s legal aid budget could be financed if they take power at the next general election. Earlier this month, ...
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NSPCC – legal aid cuts ‘risk miscarriages of justice’
Children’s charity the NSPCC has warned that government proposals to cut legal aid for vulnerable children and families would ‘risk miscarriages of family justice’. NSPCC lawyer Barbara Esam said: ‘The proposed, repeated cuts in legal support in family law cases comes at the worst possible time, ...
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The French estate of an English client: practical aspects
A case study handling the issue of inheritance between England, Wales and France We are to consider the inheritance of the estate of an Englishman deceased in England and owning property in France. The ...
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Baby P review could end child care court fees
Local authority solicitors have welcomed a government decision that could lead to the ending of court fees for child care proceedings. A review of fees is one of 58 recommendations in Lord Laming’s report into the protection of children commissioned following the 2007 death of London toddler ‘Baby P’. ...