Pro-life? The law on abortion
Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act, which legalised the availability of terminations to women throughout the UK (but not Northern Ireland). Despite the passage of time, abortion still seems to be a live and very divisive issue. I had always assumed that the law governing the procedure was safely set in stone and was surprised recently to learn that there are plans by various pro-life groups to challenge the existing legislation. A key aspect of this is the push to reduce the current 24-week pregnancy limit on abortions to 20 weeks. Continue reading “Pro-life? The law on abortion”
‘Pro bono’, a Latin phrase meaning ‘for the good – not something the general public usually associates with the law and those that work in the profession. On one level you can see why they come to that conclusion. We have all sat through lectures in which the lecturer has pulled some lawyer joke out of his/her proverbial hat! 
Mick Hume, in his 16th October 2007 article for The Times, updates Voltaire’s famous comment on freedom of speech: “I may not want to look at your boring pictures. But I will defend to the end your right to take them”. In this he refers to the contest between ‘privacy’ and ‘free speech’ that has been battling it out for many years, though reignited in the UK since the Human Rights Act came into effect in 2000. 
As I emerged from a lecture a stranger came up to me and said ‘You’re Dominic’. I endeavoured to remember her name and where we could have met. ‘How do you know me?’ I asked. ‘Everyone knows who you are,’ she replied with a smile. I was genuinely surprised and even more so when I checked my email and found a message inviting me to join a group on Facebook called ‘The Dominic Hatje Appreciation Society’. 
Well here we have it. Ten years post-mortem and the two conjoined inquests into the tragic deaths of these two people are underway. “Finally!” I can hear people declare… Here comes the panacea to those burning questions that arise out of that fateful night in Paris of August 31, 1997. Here is true justice at work – something we, the British public, can be truly proud of. The scales of justice are at work now and in a few short months all the answers to those difficult questions will be revealed. We will finally have some closure and this unfortunate chapter in the history of this country can be put behind us. We all hope and indeed trust that it will be true justice that turns up and not the great British brand of justice that was meted out to the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Bridgewater Four. But of course that will not happen; times have changed after all. We live in the post-9/11 world of swift, clinical and effective justice, do we not? 
“Justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.” Lord Hewart’s aphorism will be overly familiar to any idealist law student. Yet, in the case of the Diana and Dodi inquest, this oft-cited phrase offers a solid defence to the barrage of criticism that the inquest has faced over recent months. Undoubtedly there are strong grounds for concern, particularly considering the mounting public expense, to a bundle of perplexing contradictions which may potentially never find definitive answers. 
In 2002, The Economist commented that “for a nation of secretive people, Britain is curiously casual about privacy”. This comment is particularly relevant in the light of the reluctance shown by the English legislature and judges to recognise a general right to privacy. Indeed, despite the impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on the development of protection of privacy, case law shows till the present day that the path of incremental evolution in this area has not been abandoned, with judges preferring to expand established torts rather than promoting the establishment of a new tort. Moreover, although there were in the past various attempts to legislate on the subject, there is still a strong-held belief in media circles that the press is and should be able to regulate itself through the Press Complaints Commission.