We’ve had an email from HHJ Madge, perhaps better known to housing lawyers as Nic Madge, co-editor with Jan Luba QC of LAG’s housing law updates and general all round doyen of the field.

I’m delighted to be told that Nic Madge has started his own site, which contains, amongst many other things, copies of the LAG housing updates for the last year (but not the current one, for obvious reasons), copies of many articles on the ECtHR and housing, and materials on possession claims prepared for the Judicial Studies Board. There is much else worth reading, some of which one will almost certainly not have seen before.

Given Nearly Legal’s general view that legal information and discussion should be as openly and freely available as possible, this is very welcome news, particularly coming from such a significant figure in the field. That sussuration you hear is the distant sound of my loud applause filtered down the tubes of t’internet.

If I have one small quibble, it is that the back issues of the housing law updates are provided in PDF format. The reasons why are easily understandable, but it does somewhat stand in the way of making them simply and directly searchable by key term, unless each one is downloaded. (I will, of course, be downloading each one. And then seeing what kludge I can perform to turn them into one unified PDF for search purposes). I know that google indexes inside PDFs, and a specialist google search term may be able to search the whole archive (I’ll get to work on that too), but simple text on a web page is always easier to search and to link to. [Edit. Nic has kindly added a word document index with cases and keywords for finding cases.]

Quibble aside, I only hope that others follow in Nic Madge’s footsteps.