The Legal Research Society

Civil and Family Court Judges will no longer wear those fantastic wigs. From the BBC : The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, has announced there will be no change to the 18th Century-style garb in criminal courts. But judges and lawyers in family and civil courts have been ordered to ditch their wigs and wing-collars. The Judicial Communications Office said the changes would save £300,000 a year after a one-off cost of about £200,000. That would be spent on producing a new civil gown, a spokesman said. The decisions follow a £110,000 consultation paper on possible reforms, which was launched in May 2003. Lord Phillips said seasonal variations in the robes of High Court judges would be abolished. I wonder if Scots or Northern Irish judges will follow suit and ditch their wigs as well. Scottish court dress is very similar to English court dress, but there are notable differences. For example, Scottish advocates wear tail coats under their gowns, and wear white...

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The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundatio...

Well perhaps not quite. But yesterday’s decision by the US Supreme Court, revoking the Court’s decision from April this year on the right of detainees at the Guantanamo Detention Centre to have hebaeus corpus cases heard in Federal Courts, can hardly be underestimated. The decision follows a prolonged battle in US courts over the rights of Guantanamo detainees under US law and the legality of the military tribunals set up by the US administration to prosecute so-called “enemy combatants”. Under US law enacted as part of the “war against terror” prisoners in US detention classed as “unlawful enemy combatants” can only be trialed by the special military tribunals set up by the US administration. The military tribunals operate, as the name implies, in the military framework and curb a number of proceedings known from the civil courts. However, this was challenged in February this year by one of the detainees awaiting trial at the Guantanamo camp in an Appeals Court in the District of Colu...

Although this is a blog for legal research, yesterday’s big news from the world of politics merits some attention among the posts of international law, US health care and valuable tips on publishing academic articles. Yesterday, Gordon Brown took the reign, finally some would say, as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Though the date for Blair’s departure was known for quite a while, yesterday’s change of leader was rightly awaited in anticipation. While Blair swiftly jetted off to the Middle East in an attempt to remedy his tarnished reputation in light of the failed Iraq invasion, his wife Cherie Blair wasted no time in taking a swipe at the UK press (and thus following her husband’s recent, and arguably well-deserved, shot at the same press corps), Brown wasted no time in forming his first Cabinet. Brown’s Cabinet contains a few interesting faces in, for example, the youngest Foreign Secretary since 1977 David Milibrand (who is joined in the Cabinet by his brother Ed as Cabinet O...

In his latest film, SiCKO, Michael Moore, the acclaimed film maker examines the ailing US health care industry. Rather than examining the challenges of the nearly 1 in 5 Americans who are uninsured, Moore focuses instead on the 250 million Americans who have health insurance coverage. Even those with insurance are not guaranteed health care as evidenced by the cases of several “ordinary Americans” whose lives have been dramatically and often tragically affected by the bureaucratic red tape of the insurance industry. Moore profiles a cross-section of tactics utilized by the for-profit insurance industry including denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions and failure to secure pre-authorization for emergency services. Moore squarely places the blame for the broken state of American health care at the feet of the US government; attributing its causes to two factors: profit and fear. First and perhaps more simply, health care goods and services have historically been treat...

At least 200,000 people have died in the Darfur region of Western Sudan, and perhaps another 2.5 million have been displaced. The West has been roundly criticized for failure to act. The question becomes though, how best to intervene in what is essentially a civil war, in which the Chinese and Russians are arming the Sudanese government? There is an interesting debate going on over at Opinio Juris on whether international law promotes or impedes the process to end the bloodshed in Darfur. Julian Ku thinks international law makes a solution to the crisis harder, not easier. As he says: notice how international law acts in ways that make a solution to this crisis harder, not easier, to achieve. An effective outside intervention by Western military powers (e.g. the U.S., U.K., France) is probably illegal (say most international lawyers) unless China and Russia consent via the Security Council or Sudan consents (don't hold your breath). So we instead get a hodgepodge of limited pea...