The Bar still has an access problem. Lots of barristers, and the Inns of Court, are collectively and (hey, this is the Bar after all) individually trying to do various things about it. But the fact remains. This is a weird job, which costs a lot to get into and
A couple of hangers-on from Monday, now: Walkers Snack Foods Ltd v Commissioners for His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (VAT - snack foods - whether standard rated by Note 5, Group 1, Part II Schedule 8 VATA 1994 - whether products made from the potato or potato starch)
I couldn't let this day go by. I have to admit it, though: I hadn't spotted the date till Dave Winer wrote about it last night. It's 40 years today since Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh to the world. The Macintosh, for more than
I haven’t done a huge amount of managing people in my life. But I’ve been managed by a few stars, and a few more stinkers. And as a barrister I’m often working with, and expected to act as de facto leader of, a legal team. So the
It's been years since I did any broadcasting. After a first slot on BBC Three Counties Radio in my 20s on the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing (I've got a tape of it somewhere; it probably belongs with some of my jazz and soul reviews
There's a bunch of LLM/AI stuff this time. It just happens that this is what was crossing my desk and caught my eye. I made this: by John Siracusa. John used to write insanely long reviews of new Mac OS releases. They were essential reading for Mac
I've said before that there's nothing wrong with a re-read. Good books, particularly good fiction books, deserve to be read more than once. This applies with force to good series: sometimes (and Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London is a prime example) threads of plot
There's been - justifiably - a lot said about the degree to which the Horizon scandal was made worse by the Post Office's ability to be a private prosecutor. It's certainly a factor. Anyone taking a basic criminal law class finds out from the
(A warning: this has quasi-explicit politics in it. Feel free to ignore, and wait for me to come back to things at least tangentially associated with law, or nerdery, or the usual subjects. I'm therefore posting it without emailing it. I'm not convinced those who signed
Issue 2 of the ongoing online Commonplace booklet. An old friend and colleague was kind enough to say this stuff gave him food for further thought. I'm touched and delighted: part of the point of this is that sometimes I'm not sure what I think about
I'm working on something about whether the Fraud Act 2006 could be used for prosecutions in relation to the Horizon scandal. Not quite there yet. Give me a bit longer. In the meantime, though, the rich and rotten vein of bandwagon-jumping by politicians following the superb ITV series
[Note: this was published on our Chambers website last week. But since it was me who wrote it, it also belongs here. Apologies to those who've therefore been exposed to it twice.] Civil courts can do lots of things. They decide whether a deal is really a deal.