Monthly Archive for February, 2008

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Obvious filler 6

My occasional attempts to get cheap laughs at the expense of passing bewildered internet searchers are getting more difficult. Virtually all of the search terms that have brought people here recently are legally related and most even make sense. I hate it when the lazy blogger’s fall back turns into hard work. So, if you detect any sense of strain in this, should the frantic feet of the serene swan become apparent, be gentle, because I’m doing it for you.

Fortunately, the odder or more hopeless of the searchers come in thematic waves

1. The fixated

shiny shorts

Yes, but only through sitting down a lot. My G.A.Y. days are … Read the full post

Admin Court latest decisions feed added

The bottom right of the blog now has both Civil Court of Appeal and Administrative Court judgments in feeds that update as soon as the judgments are released on Bailii.

Non-techies can look away now.

For the technically interested, this is a complete kludge. The beta Bailli recent decisions RSS feed is filtered through a Yahoo pipe, adapted from one by Nick Holmes, to give only Admin decisions. But the resulting RSS feed from the Yahoo pipe wouldn’t show up in the WordPress RSS widget whatever I did to it, so the Yahoo feed has been redirected through Feedburner to give a feed that does show up. If anybody wants … Read the full post

Harry Potter's premises, 'what is a house?' and waivers

OK, so they are late. In fact so late that the Times has started to catch up. Finally, some brief comments on the three cases from last week.

Majorstake Limited (Respondents) v Curtis (Appellant) [2008] UKHL 10. What constitutes a premises for the purposes of section 47(2)(b)(ii) of the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993? (the section dealing with landlord’s proposed developments to the premises)

The key phrase is “the whole or a substantial part of any premises in which the flat is contained”. Can the landlord just identify ‘the premises’ themselves, by ‘drawing their own line’ on a plan that includes the tenant’s flat and include … Read the full post

Green Ink and old Olivettis

With my usual and frankly uncanny ability to be a couple of days ahead of the zeitgeist, I posted on litigants-in-person a few days ago, only to see the Guardian do a feature piece on LiPs today. Granted they put a little more effort into it, and actually interviewed people and things like that, but we say pretty much the same things.

In addition, my post is much, much shorter, and so, brevity being not only a virtue but a mark of elegance, I can only pity the poor Guardian having to play catch up by substituting a modicum of effort and research for pith.

The Guardian article is … Read the full post

Oliver Twist

Charon QCNot being satisfied with putting the boot in only once to Caroline ‘Workhouse’ Flint, I’ve had another go, this time in a podcast with Charon QC, now available for your listening pleasure.

I hope and trust that this is giving the proposals more attention that they require.… Read the full post

New news

I’ve been having a bit of a play. You may notice a new page tab for “Housing News Feeds” above. This has the RSS feeds of various housing related sites and blogs, so they will be constantly updated with any new items. Hopefully, it will be worth checking whenever you stop by.

The problem is that so few sites actually have RSS feeds for their news pages. I’ve done what I can with various tools that try to turn fixed web pages into RSS feeds, with limited success.

Remarkably, the Communities.gov.uk site is very well provided with news feeds and Inside Housing has one. But other organisations, like Shelter, don’t … Read the full post

Birmingham v Aweys

Hot off the press – judgment released today.

Birmingham, apparently intent on suicide, appealed the judicial review decision in Aweys. Birmingham City Council v Abdishakur Aweys & Ors [2008] EWCA Civ 48. They lost, badly, on all counts.

Birmingham argued that accommodation that was not suitable under section 175(3) could still be suitable for a limited time for the purposes of section 210 after a duty under section 193 has been accepted. The court held otherwise, the definition of ‘suitable’ has to be the same before and after the housing duty arose. Awua (R (ex p Awua) v Brent LBC [1996] 1 A.C. 55) did not help Birmingham because … Read the full post



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