Welcome to Without Prejudice. On the panel tonight are regulars, Carl Gardner and David Allen Green and our guests Cat Griffiths, Editor of The Lawyer and Nichola Higgins, a practising barrister and former Chair of The Young Barristers Committee.
We have five main topics for discussion –
ABS and disruptives
Oaths in court
Judicial Advocacy assessment
Sun arrests
Francis FitzGibbon QC statement to Leveson and the value of legal blogging
Useful reading:
Francis FitzGibbon QC : Witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry on blogging and ethics
The Guardian: Lord Justice Moses and the 161 criteria
“Judges know the new ratings scheme for advocates is misconceived and over-elaborate. But they don’t want anyone else doing it.”
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In association with The Lawyer
I’d like to thank Lawtel, Westlaw, Cassons For Counsel, City University Law School, David Phillips & Partners Solicitors, Inksters Solicitors, Iken, LBC Wise Counsel, Carrs Solicitors, JMW Solicitors – Manchester, Pannone and Cellmark for sponsoring the podcast – and the free student materials on Insite Law – appreciated.
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[…] Without Prejudice this week, regulars, Cat Griffiths (editor of The Lawyer) and barrister Nichola Higgins join David Allen […]
Got to the end, and thought it might be prudent to return here to apologise for the length. 🙂
OT, possibly, but has some possible parallels to the #twitterjoketrial and the capacity of the judiciary and legal establishment to adapt their role to the ‘modern world’ – sorry, a naff description, but I couldn’t think of anything better right now.
The issue I am concerned about can be found at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-17079853
Do you know anything about this one, or is there any court reporting source where we can find out if this bloke really was just a malicious idiot? If he was, then fine, there is no problem. However, the initial reactions coming up on some of the geek sites, including the American ones, sound a bit sceptical of the judgement, and the prosecution’s stance which basically was that they ‘do not accept his actions were anything but malicious.’
Otherwise, the danger we possibley seem to face is having a judiciary and prosecution that have no idea of the modern tecnological world, how younger people think, with the potential consequence that we just drive our ‘white hats’, with their skills, underground, or off to pastures where they will be welcomed with open arms
Sadly, the most detailed and balanced info on this that I can drag up seems to be in the Huffington Post, again a measure of how poor our own UK reporting seems to be – don’t look at the DM version unless you want to risk choking on your coffee, or Tempranillo
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/17/facebook-hack-glenn-mangham-jailed_n_1285162.html
It states
‘Judge McCreath told him: “I bear in mind you have never been in trouble before, that you’re young in physical years and maybe emotionally younger than your physical age, and I bear in mind all the aspects of your psychological and personal make-up.
“I acknowledge also that you never intended to pass any information you got through these criminal offences to anyone else and you never did so, and I acknowledge you never intended to make any financial gain for yourself from these offences.
“But this was not just a bit of harmless experimentation. You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance.”
He described Mangham’s actions as “persistent conduct, sophisticated conduct and conduct that had at least the risk of putting in danger the reputation of an innocent employee of Facebook.”
Mangham’s claim that he had always intended to alert the website to what he had done was a retrospective justification for it, rather than his motivation, he added.’
Given that this lad had previously been paid £7K by Yahoo for doing something similar, and providing them with the information which pointed out to them what weaknesses their systems had, it seems strange that a court has seen him as doing something contrary here and deeming him a criminal whilst even conceding that he had, as i read it, no criminal intent
If the legal system is going to use the ‘letter’ of existing laws to punish people who have no criminal intent, which, as an aside, I am sure the wicked Sherriff of Nottingham also didn’t have when blowing Robin Hood sky high, we seem to be on a pretty slippery slope
Apologies if you think I have hijacked your thread. No offence will be taken if you politely, or even rudely, ignore this
[…] A ‘powerful state’ is often left undefined by contemporary politicians and lawyers. The problem may not come from determining what lies in scope of the state, perhaps including the judges, the MPs, the police, or their Lordships, but explaining what that power is and how it is manifest. The law relating to whether the UK should intervene in Syria is a different entity to the laws regulating how the UK should intervene with its own citizens, and the general notion of the ‘abuse of power’ is an important one. David Allen Green has done much to highlight its significance, and, in his regular column in the “New Statesman”, David considered the relationship between civil disobedience and the rule of law. […]