Features

Anne Fairpo, from the Bar Council’s IT Panel, on cybercrime and how members of the Bar should deal with identity theft.  

From time to time, your Bar IT Panel offer practical tips on how to handle certain issues of the day. This time around it is cybercrime or as expressed in more mundane terms, identity theft. In other words, someone’s pinched all the content from my website and is using it on their own website; they are pretending to be me; what do I do? 

David Thomas QC, LLD was the country’s authority on the law and practice of sentencing. Sir David Maddison reflects upon his life and how he revolutionised the courts’ approach to sentencing.  

David Thomas’s death on 30th September, 2013 marked the passing of the pre-eminent authority on the law and practice of sentencing in the criminal courts of England and Wales. His name was and remains known to almost every practitioner, magistrate, Recorder and judge dealing with criminal cases. He will be greatly missed by his many friends and admirers in legal and academic circles. 

Paul Marshall on Andrew Mitchell MP v News Group Newspapers Ltd and the stripping of judicial discretion.  

  “‘Sit down!’ roars the captain. “Ye sot and swine, do ye know what ye’ve done? Ye’ve murdered the boy!’  

 Mr Shuan seemed to understand; for he sat down again and put his hand to his brow.  

 ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he brought me a dirty pannikin’  

 At that word, the captain and I and Mr Riach all looked at each other for a second with a kind of frightened look….”  

The atrocities committed during the Rwandan genocide left lasting psychological scars on the majority of its survivors, making the drafting of its mental health legislation all the more poignant, says Laura Davidson.  

In 2013 I was asked by the Rwandan government to draft the country’s first mental health legislation and to advise on its mental health policy. Consequently I took a sabbatical from my practice at the Bar and set off for East Africa. 

Francis FitzGibbon QC and Abigail Bright examine how human rights law has been articulated and interpreted by the European Courts, the United Kingdom Courts and the British Government, and the political reality of “Bringing Rights Home”.  

Our law is saturated with human rights principles. It is almost impossible to practise law of any kind without at least a passing knowledge of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). (The practice of politics is another matter.) The Act has had a palpable impact on relations between the State and the citizen in almost every sphere of interaction. 

Job title 

Joint Senior Clerk, 7KBW 

7KBW is a leading set of chambers with experts specialising in the full breadth of commercial law. 

The Calm Before The Storm 

Despite initial skirmishes, the phoney war between the publicly funded Bar and the Ministry of “Justice” continues while we wait for the real conflict to begin. Is the Public Defender scheme the plan B of which my mandarin friend warned me or is it yet another smokescreen to cover even more awful shenanigans deep in the Whitehall bunker? Andrew, our Senior Clerk, who hides a twitchy personality under a mask of assurance and confidence, came upstairs for our weekly Headmaster’s chat. It had long ago ceased to be enjoyable and now is simply a list of actual, putative, impending or imaginary crises.  

Toby Craig examines our relationship both with and within Europe and the impact on political debate.  

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War. That in itself has been the cause of significant argument, with Education Secretary Michael Gove leading the charge against what he sees as left-wing myths about the conflict. He singled out Blackadder’s characterisation of the First World War as a ‘misbegotten shambles’ as particularly offensive to what he views as a ‘just’ if ‘uniquely horrific’ war. 

One year on from its launch, COMBAR’s James Leabeater offers his views on BARCO.  

Barristers need to get used to considering and evaluating credit risk. Since January 2013 barristers and solicitors have been agreeing contracts with each other. For some, not much has changed. Under the BSB’s Standard Contractual Terms, for example, the solicitor is liable to pay barristers’ fees, whether or not the lay client has paid the solicitor. The solicitor takes the credit risk. 

Rhys Taylor, a barrister at 30 Park Place, Cardiff, explains how BARCO has worked for him.  

Sitting on my desk early last year was a print out from Carol Harris, with 13 attachments relating to something called BARCO, the new Bar Council escrow account.