"Legal clean-out purges old laws

By Michael Peel, Legal Correspondent

Published: March 19 2008 03:50 | Last updated: March 19 2008 03:50

Hundreds of allegedly obsolete laws on subjects ranging from the East India Company to servants who impersonate their masters would be scrapped under plans before parliament.

The Ministry of Justice said the pruning of “meaningless and defunct laws” would remove all or part of 328 acts of parliament, although it will leave in force legal oddities such as the rights of British monarchs to the heads and tails of whales caught off the country’s shores."

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It has always seemed that history is the area of research best suited for the heavy use of technology.  A new wiki on English medieval legal documents confirms this again!

The notice of the wiki, published on the listserv of the American Association of Law Libraries Special Interest Section for Foreign, Comparative and International Law says, "Hazel Lord, Senior Law Librarian at the University of Southern California School of Law has been tirelessly working on a bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents (covering the years 600-1532).  What she had thought originally would only be a few hundred sources, has blossomed into a list of close to 1,000 sources!"

She has created a wiki for this project.  The wiki can be found here:  http://emld.usc.edu/tiki-index.php.

She hopes that you will take a look and participate.

The UK Parliament is planning to put 200 years of its debates online. All Hansard reports from 1804 through 2004 are scheduled to be digitized and posted.  Currently, Handsard debates from November 1988 are available at the Parliament web site.

This is really interesting. The proposed new British Bill of Rights looks increasingly like a bill of responsibilities.  Responsibilities that are enforceable in court!

More from The Guardian:

A new British bill of rights and duties may include duties of behaviour between fellow citizens that are enforceable by judges, the justice secretary Jack Straw indicated yesterday. Straw, also lord chancellor, is planning a British bill of rights to complement the European convention on human rights. The exercise is separate from a possible 20-year plan to introduce a potential British written constitution.

Straw made his remarks in a speech at George Washington University, Washington DC, where he also indicated that a written constitution was 20 years away. He said he was looking at a US-style sentencing commission that might take into account the size of the prison population in making broad decisions on sentencing.

The constitutional conversation is getting interesting.  Here The Guardian gets in its two cents (is that pence?):

Evolution not revolution is the way for constitutions to develop - except, perhaps, at times in history when a real revolution is under way. That was the message of justice secretary Jack Straw yesterday, as he spoke to a Washington audience. The tumultuous circumstances of American independence allowed the founding fathers to build up enduring rules from first principles; in more ordinary times a constitution written on a blank sheet will provide only a paper barrier against the abuse of power.

That didn't take long. Responses to Straw's comments are coming fast and furious. This will be interesting to watch. Here is an article in The Times:

What a difference a few hours make. In the morning, Jack Straw’s heavily qualified hints about working towards a written constitution were welcomed by Unlock Democracy, a leading reform group. Then, in the afternoon, Mr Straw’s full speech, entitled “Modernising the Magna Carta”, received a more hostile response: “what a load of cobblers,” as the OurKingdom website put it.

Jack Straw discussed the future of the British constitution and bill of rights and responsibilities on BBC yesterday.  The Guardian picks it up:

Britain is unlikely to have a full written constitution for at least 10 or 20 years, the justice secretary, Jack Straw, said today.

He confirmed that he is drawing up plans for a draft bill of rights and responsibilities, which would set down in one document the rights that citizens have, and also their civic duties.

But he stressed that this would not be the same as a new written constitution, such as America's.

As a Supreme Court for the UK approaches, appellate judging is in the news. From The Times:

How many law lords does it take to decide a case? Normally, the answer is five. But last week and this, nine members of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords are hearing two important cases. When the new Supreme Court opens its doors in October 2009, seven or nine justices should hear every case.

There are 12 law lords, if you count (and no one has done so for a long time) Lord Saville of Newdigate, who has spent the past ten years out of the office chairing the inquiry into the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland and who is unlikely ever to return to judicial work even when (if ?) he finishes his report. But the remaining 11 law lords never squeeze around the same table to hear appeals. Almost all appeals are heard by five law lords. Exceptionally, nine of them listened to argument last week in a case brought by the President of the republic of Equatorial Guinea against defendants who he alleges conspired in England and elsewhere to overthrow the Government and seize power by means of a coup which, in the event, failed. And nine judges are this week hearing a case brought against the Prime Minister by two mothers whose sons were servicemen killed on duty in Iraq and who contend that there should be an inquiry into whether the invasion was in breach of international law.