Liadnan

.. the prize being keeping my professional practicing certificate when the relevant date comes round in just under 12 months time. Continuing Professional Development points that is. Thinking I'd better go and get some I glanced at the noticeboard and saw there was something on at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies about enviromental law and the human rights act, alternatively something on in the Law Society about A. v. Home Secretary (the nice little mess the Lords' made of the Government's "anti-terrorism" legislation last month). Since (a) the Law Society one cost 10 quid while the other was free; (b) the Law Society sold off the better contents of its wine cellar a few years ago and (c) the IALS one was actually tangentially relevant to stuff I do, I went to that.

The relevance is fairly simple: a great deal of environmental law is about land; property rights in and liabilities in respect of land is a fairly major strand of my practice, so though environmental stuff doesn't come up that often in things that come in to me, I tend to try and keep some vague idea of what's going on in that field. You never know what might be in your pigeonhole tomorrow. I have done very minor bits of work on, for instance, the fall-out from what remains the leading pollution case in England and Wales. That case itself is years old, but the litigation continues, since ever since then two (and occasionally three) parties have been suing one another, in several different cases, originally and still mainly to decide "well, who's really going to pay for all this". When I was a pupil I sat in on one of the trials and heard the judge wonder whether some of the later cases between the parties really owe more to the individuals behind it all really not liking one another very much and spending their weekends thinking up new cases to bring (to quote: "this case is another in the seemingly un-ending string of litigation between X and Y. After two days of argument it remains a mystery to me why the outcome of this case actually matters, practically speaking, to either party, ") but I digress.

The answer to the question how much difference has the Human Rights Act made to environmental litigation? turned out to be bugger all, which is probably a good thing.

The wine almost certainly wasn't any better there than at the Law Society, but the conversation afterwards probably was. At least, it seemed so after several glasses of the wine.

In other news, I spent Saturday morning recovering from a hangover, courtesy of A.J.Hall&Co, Saturday afternoon at the first part of the NT adaptation of His Dark Materials in the company of Steve, Martin, Kim, and Kate (comments after part 2 next Sat but in short well worth it, thanks to Steve for organising us) then descended.. there is no alternative to the phrase "from the sublime to the ridiculous" here... to Chinese Elvis on the Old Kent Road with Steph, Rob, Adele, D, and Adele's parents. Words fail me. Sunday I'm unsure what I did but my tax return remains as yet unfiled.

... and a hearing anticipated to be a five minute in and out job turns into an hour and a half, with three counsel (all of whom were in agreement) being shouted at for the status of papers in a case they'd all received (in place of more senior people whose attendance was thought to be an unwarranted expense for such a hearing) the day before.

Oh well.

Two small snippets from this week's Private Eye that amused me:

In a world of "dogging", "piking" and other exotic modern practices, it can be tricky for hacks to keep up with the latest street-slang. Last week, however, consensus was reached on the Street of Shame on how to deal with the Kevin Spacey mugging story. The Independent, Times, Mirror and Daily Mail all described the actor not as a friend of Dorothy but "a friend of Peter Mandelson."

(I can't imagine what they might possibly be insinuating about Spacey, and the story...).

and a reference to the critics "quote" on the posters for the stage version of When Harry met Sally starring Alyson Hannigan and Luke Perry.

As quoted on the posters, the line is "Fans of Hannigan and Perry will be ecstatic", and I confess that, seeing them as I come up the escalators at Holborn every morning, the cynic in me had briefly wondered about the context of that. Well, apparently, the rest of the sentence, in a Time Out review, was "...their companions will just have to fake an interest", with added comments that "it is a long and tedious play" and "halfway through I began to wish that Harry and Sally had never met."

(While I haven't seen the play, I can't really see that the film is a natural candidate for a transfer to stage.)

Oh, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden unfavourably compares the analysis of Andrew Sullivan on Iraq to that of the Fafblog.. Read it and weep.