Monthly Archive for September, 2006

Life? What life?

By NL on 28/09/2006. 0 Comments

I was at a conference with a client and Counsel the other day at a certain Lincoln’s Inn Fields chambers. The place was heaving with lighting stands, women with clipboards and the kind of unshaven, tool belted man that can only be a rigger. Lo, they were filming the ‘This Life’ 10 years on Christmas special.

Allegedly, the programme spawned a whole generation of wannabe lawyers, surely down to the sex, drugs and nifty shared early Victorian (late Regency?) house rather than the joys of a well drafted contract, or agressively timed application.

Nearly Legal was not tempted to the law by ‘This Life’, but I did enjoy it, so … Read the full post

Posted in Various (non-housing). Tags: , .

"Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

By NL on 27/09/2006. 0 Comments

The Times Law blog suggests that the incoming age discrimination legislation could result in some bizarre misinterpretations, citing the QCA’s frankly strange interpretation of the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 as a prior example.

This could well be true. It is not only the denizens of Daily Mail land who are incapable of distinguishing between ‘treat everyone the same’ and ‘nothing that unreasonably makes things more difficult for someone on grounds of…’. Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 satire on the former, ‘Harrison Bergeron‘, is still taken as astute criticism by the ‘political correctness gone mad’ troupe.

Of course, we won’t know the details of the incoming law until the tribunals and … Read the full post

Posted in Various (non-housing). Tags: , .

Do you wanna be in my CLAN

By NL on 21/09/2006. 0 Comments

Some of those of us metaphorically stripped to the waist at the civil legal aid coalface will be impressed or envious at the fast work of Scott-Moncrieff Harbour & Sinclair, who have decided that it is better to pre-empt the Legal Services Commission’s approach to Community Legal Advice Networks (CLANS) than await whatever prescription descends from the heights. They are probably right.

For anyone still wondering, CLANS are the LSC’s answer to the problem of the near total lack of rural or urban large firms capable of delivering the LSC vision of ‘holistic’ one stop shops for civil problems, given that such problems are usually intertwined; debt, benefits, family, housing, … Read the full post

Posted in Various (non-housing). Tags: , , .

Obvious filler

By NL on 19/09/2006. 1 Comment

I ought to be drafting a brief to Counsel that is needed tomorrow, and I will, I will, but as a distraction activity, it is time for the fall back post of every lazy blogger – a trawl through the search engine keyphrases log. Genuine search click throughs all.

So, nearly legal answers your questions…

1. bringing a company into disrepute?

I’m trying to avoid it. If you are after how-to hints, there are no shortage of casualty bloggers’ tales.

2. the fountain duchamp opinion feminist?

It is a stand up pissoir, and an, erm, curved receptacle. But it is rendered useless for that purpose and the title ‘Fountain’ involves … Read the full post

Posted in Various (non-housing). Tags: , .

Art and copyright 2

By NL on 17/09/2006. 0 Comments

Table of contents for Art and Copyright

  1. In the red corner, art, in the blue corner, copyright.
  2. Art and copyright 2

Following on from this post, which suggested a strong incompatibility between contemporary art practices and copyright law in terms of the potential failure of copyright to cover some contemporary art, I’d like to take a quick look at the reverse – how contemporary art approaches copyright.

This should be a shorter post, because the brief answer is that current art practice generally fails to understand or consider copyright.

A basic tenet of contemporary art, as I mentioned before, is that the found object, or ready-made, is capable of … Read the full post

Posted in Various (non-housing). Tags: , .

All the advice you need for a quid.

By NL on 12/09/2006. 0 Comments

And just in case one wasn’t depressed enough about legal aid…

Yikes. I’d missed this in the Observer, as I was out of the country. Thanks to Tessa Shepperson again for picking it up and for her considered post.

I share her misgivings about the reported referral rate of the Community Legal Service phone line. 13% seems astonishingly low, as I find it hard to credit that most housing problems or welfare/benefit problems, for example, can be solved by general advice. I accept that a lot of the calls may be low level relatively general problems, about debt for instance, but 13% referrals?

The clients are indeed unlikely to … Read the full post

Posted in Various (non-housing). Tags: , , .

Nonsense, m'Lud

By NL on 12/09/2006. 0 Comments

While on the topic of legal aid funding, Terminological Inexactitude has a short and blunt judgement on Carter in which I can only concur.… Read the full post

Posted in Various (non-housing). Tags: .
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