Slapper mulls the meaning of life

Our article 'Immigration in Crisis' - about the number of firms pulling out of publicly-funded asylum work (See [2004] Gazette, 8 April, 1) - has prompted Gary Slapper, professor of law at the Open University, to follow in the footsteps of Rome's Cicero or our own Jeremy Bentham as a lawyer-philosopher.

'It reminds me of that old conundrum about the social nature of realities; for example, does a tree make a sound if it falls in a wilderness where there are no ears to hear it?' he writes.

'If there is no-one to advise about some rights, and no-one who could afford to vindicate them anyway, do they meaningfully exist? Understandably, people used to laugh out loud at the magnificent list of rights and guarantees of welfare printed in the old USSR constitution, when everyone knew the reality of appalling conditions and the absence of de facto rights people suffered in the Soviet Russian empire.

We should beware the dangers of becoming a culture festooned with paper rights and cardboard cut-out lawyers.' Quite.

Obiter is therefore delighted to announce that Prof Slapper has agreed to become our philosopher-in-residence.

'I will aim to make the abstract of down-to-earth relevance,' he says.

'Regrettably, abstraction is not an ascendant pursuit - for every university philosophy department that is closed down, perhaps 50 new branches of McDonald's are opened.' More soon.