Miscellany
Playing tag
I’ve been tagged by Charon QC and must tell you 5 things you didn’t know about me (with bonus trivia added): 1. Although I was born in Twickenham, I spent my formative years in apartheid-era South Africa. Despite having returned 30 years ago, my vowels are still flat and people still ask me where I’m […]
How to spend the next 2 minutes
Visit the New Popular Edition Maps. Locate your home/office. Enter the post code. Tell your friends.
Weird Firefox behaviour explained
I have just abandoned IE6 at work completely in favour of Firefox, though I’ve been using Firefox at home for some time. I mentioned in a recent post some weird behaviour in Firefox when a duff URL was linked. I now find this in Firefox help which perhaps explains it: By default, if you enter […]
Culture vulture
You learn something every day on the web en passant. Well numerous things in fact. I set out to check out the website revamp at DCMSwho nowglory under the domain name culture.gov.uk.On this voyage I discovered: 1)Firefox resolves URLs in strange ways: DCMS is now producing RSS feeds of news and FoI requests. Top marks […]
The Ms have it
Lotus 123 was, to my mind, the best of the first killer apps: better than space invaders and the word processor. You could tabulate data and construct elaborate formulae to produce whatever result you wanted! That delight is now enabled by Excel. On behalf of the family judiciary I’ve been having a go with maintenance […]
Today we Googled “the man on the Clapham omnibus”
Question. I have been seeking for a long time now the details of the case where a reasonable man is defined as “the man on the Clapham Omnibus”. Answer. First use of the phrase is attributed to Lord Justice Greer, in Hall v. Brooklands Auto Racing Club (1933) 1 KB 205, at p 224. The […]
McLibel II – the result
The success of the McLibel two on 15 February in challenging the fairness of their trial on the grounds that the denial of legal aid was in breach of their human rights has already been widely reported in the national and legal press. However, first off the blocks in my book was the Scotsman, the […]
The web – it all started in SW14
Well … not quite, but I was interested to discover that Time Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, grew up in Sheen, London SW14, home of infolaw, and went to Sheen Mount primary school not 100 yards from my front door where my children followed some years later. He then went on to secondary school at […]
McLibel II
The 1997 case of McDonalds v Steel & Morris was notable in a number of respects. It provided intriguing reading in the silly season, ran for 314 days and produced a judgment of several hundred pages. It was also one of the first cases to be reported by the Court Service on the web (in […]
Punctuation and plain English for lawyers
Punctuation is a touchy subject for some lawyers of the old school; indeed good legal drafting was based on the premise that one should not use puntuation at all. Thankfully, most have deserted that position and would agree that punctuation “has always been offered in a spirit of helpfulness, to underline meaning and prevent awkward […]
Will’s will
William Shakespeare’s will is now available to the public to read online, nearly 400 years after the playwright put quill to paper. The historic document, in which Shakespeare famously bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his wife, has been put on the web by the National Archives. The wills of more than 100 other famous figures […]
