This week’s overturning of Proposition 8 in California is obviously welcome news. Amending California’s state constitution to state that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California” is nakedly discriminatory and Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to strike it down should be applauded.
There is, though, something else that’s important to [...]
Up in Scotland there has been some disquiet over the plans the Grampian NHS trust to enforce particularly over-the-top smoking ban. The board has been considering plans to ban nurses from smoking while on breaks or indeed at any time while in uniform. Even carrying tobacco about their person could, under the plans, have [...]
Scotland, sex and decency. The combination of the three has long been known to generate weird and authoritarian outcomes. The scottish law against “Outraging Public Decency” appears to potentially criminalise anything that people might find a bit icky, and not long ago was used to convict somebody for having sex with his bicycle in the [...]
As many of you know, this website takes its name from the social structure of pre-revolutionary France. Back then, the Clergy and Nobility were respectively known as the First and Second Estates, while the commoners were known as the Third Estate. One of the major grievances of the original Third Estate was its unjust fiscal [...]
Nick Clegg is right about one thing: After 13 years of New Labour authoritarianism laws to restore our liberties really ought to be on the agenda. Yet, despite the scrapping of ID, I do not believe that the Cleggeron government are capable of rising to such a challenge.
So I thought we the I would [...]
Today Gary Mann, a 52 year old former fire fighter, will be extradited to serve a 2 year prison sentence imposed by a Portugese court.
Mann was originally arrested during the Euro 2004 football tournament, on suspicion of causing a riot. He was tried and convicted within 48 hours of his initial arrest. [...]
Over recent weeks I have seen number of posters bearing the logo of the Metropolitan Police on the walls of internet cafes. The one pictured on the right is fairly typical. It tells users that they may not download or even view any material that “causes offense to members of the public”, and that doing [...]
Some people are idiots. Some people, it seems, believe civil rights should come with a caveat, asserting that they don’t apply to people we don’t like. Perhaps we ought to insert “not if you’re a cunt” somewhere into the Magna Carta. And so we turn to the case of the soon to be ex-MP’s receiving [...]
The US launch of the iPad marks a historic moment. Not ‘the end of books’ as some doomsayers would have it, or the even the start of the great Books vs Internet wars. No, today Apple has reversed the flow of their business model. And with it, the internet.
Some explanation. Ever wondered why most people [...]
This is a guest post by Selena Gablah.
A couple of days ago Paul Mendelle QC, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, wrote an angry letter to The Times in response to Jack Straw’s proposal to cut rates of pay for legal aid barristers by 18%. In it, he claimed that legal aid barristers take home [...]
