By Felicity Gerry
Imagine that and you are 17-years-old and wrongly convicted! Yesterday, the Court of Appeal quashed Sam Hallam’s conviction for murder by joint enterprise after he had served seven years of a life sentence. He is now 24. He has been inside since before Take That announced they would reform and before Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire became the highest grossing film of 2005. He has missed the 2008 Olympics and Diversity winning #BGT. He will not have been Facebooking his mates or hanging out with girls. He …
By Eduardo Ustaran
Three years have gone by since the European Parliament shocked and awed everyone by tweaking the e-privacy directive and introducing the most controversial word in the data protection glossary – consent – in the provision that deals with Internet cookies.
The debate that followed immediately afterwards about the meaning of consent and whether it will ever be realistic to get everyone using the web to comprehend, consider and positively accept the use of cookies is still ongoing.
Much has been said, written and argued about this subject in the past …
By Felicity Gerry
Imagine that and you are 17-years-old and wrongly convicted! Yesterday, the Court of Appeal quashed Sam Hallam’s conviction for murder by joint enterprise after he had served seven years of a life sentence. He is now 24. He has been inside since before Take That announced they would reform and before Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire became the highest grossing film of 2005. He has missed the 2008 Olympics and Diversity winning #BGT. He will not have been Facebooking his mates or hanging out with girls. He …
By Edward Cole
There appears to be an emerging consensus on Halsbury’s Law Exchange that jury trials are a good thing – see previous blogs here and here. This may be so, but the four mainstream arguments commonly advanced to support jury trials, and repeated in previous articles, do not stand serious scrutiny.
The first argument is that because jury trials have been part of our history since (at least) Magna Carta, they are at the core of our system of justice.
The fact that justice involved people like jurors since before the …
By James Wilson
I enjoyed the privilege over the weekend of attending the 2012 Qatar Law Forum, held in Doha. The theme of the conference was “The rule of law in a time of change”. The conference was attended by over 400 delegates from approximately 60 jurisdictions, including many leading figures from the legal profession in this country. Here are a few thoughts on some of the sessions I attended and the conference in general.
The first Qatari Law Forum, held in 2009, had focussed largely on the international financial crisis. Needless …
By Charles Foster
The Mental Capacity Act 2005 contains detailed provision for advance decisions – otherwise known as advance directives: see ss 24, 25 and 26. These are statements made by a person when capacitous, which may apply when the person loses capacity. If they are “valid and applicable” they have the same effect as if made by that person capacitously. A competent patient has the right to refuse even life-sustaining treatment.
An advance decision in relation to the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment will not be “applicable” to the relevant treatment unless …
