The Legal Research Society

On Thursday 01 November at 5pm, the Society will hold its first roundtable discussion of this academic year in Taylor C28. The chosen topic is Iran and the Right to Nuclear Energy . The discussion will be moderated by Paula Herm and Ahmed Hassanein. Details of the society's programme for the coming weeks and months will follow soon.

A law degree can lead to many different careers and job possibilities. These include traditional law areas such as litigation, advising and perhaps even teaching the law. In the US, however, it seems that law graduates have an additional option open to them; that of entering the race to become President of the United States. The New York Times has an interesting article on the legal backgrounds of both sides of the current contenders for the upcoming US presidency. The article describes how the three Democratic candidates - Hillary R. Clinton, Barrack Obama and John Edwards - are all law graduates and that the three Republican candidates - Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thomson - hold similar law degrees. In fact, Sen. John McCain is the only serious contender not holding a law degree. All of the six lawyers have, bar Romney, to some extent, used their law degrees either in private practice or as prosecutors. In addition, Obama and Clinton have utilized their degrees in ac

Former Vice-President Al Gore today won the Nobel Peace Prize for his movie An Inconvenient Truth . Gore’s movie, from 2006, is based on talks and slide shows that Gore toured extensively with after loosing the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000. It describes the scientific data on, and portrays the effects of, global warming in an easy-to-understand manner. Earlier this year, Gore won an Academy Award for best documentary feature for his movie. Gore has won popular accolades for the film, although it has, at the same time, been criticized for portraying the science behind global warming as overly simplistic, and for exaggerating the facts and evidence. Gore shares this year’s prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – a UN body set up to assess the scientific evidence in relation to human-induced climate change. The Nobel Committee cites Gore’s and the IPCC’s “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change,” as w

As some of you might have heard already, the Leonardo da Vinci painting Madonna of the Yarnwinder was recovered yesterday by the Dumfries and Galloway Police after it was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire four years ago. The press has already written extensively about the recovery (see The Times and BBC ) but nevertheless it warrants a bit of attention from the Legal Research Society. This is mainly down to our own Derek Fincham, who this morning appeared on the BBC radio programme Good Morning Scotland to give an interview on the significance of the recovery as well as to the general problem of art theft. Derek makes a number of good points, in particular with regard to the vulnerable situation of arts and antiquities stored in Scotland’s many country estates. Listen for yourself here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7020000/newsid_7029600/7029610.stm?bw=bb&mp=wm&news=1 . As a little side note, it is worth mentioning that four persons were arrested in c