Education

Articles

29 Jul 2008

Practice makes perfect

Law courses that offer more practical elements to help to prepare students for the rigours of practice should be embraced as attractive to students and employers,says Philip Roberts

17 Jun 2008

Knife through the stereotypes

ARound about the time I was still doing juvenile court crime – like delinquency, a practice one hopes to grow out of – the fashion was to blame all society's ills on single mothers. As far as the tabloids and government policy ( often indistinguishable, then as now) was concerned, their general fecklessness , indolence and irresponsibility was to blame for everything. Specifically, their pig headed refusal to have truck with the absent heroes who had fathered their children was the root cause of 'Britain's Breakdown'. It was always a surprise to go to court and meet the reality – worried, hard working, committed women trying to keep their families together against the odds. Not all of course – the odorously pissed mama, a stranger to education, employment or indeed soap, who swigged cans of loopy juice while letting rip to her strongly held views about immigration and shouting obscenities at her 11-year-old wasn't a particularly great advert for motherhood, or indeed our species. Her mantra was that Britain was no longer a place for the decent white working class, like her. After an afternoon of this I did mutter 'Well, one out of three ain't bad' but by then she was too drunk to hear it. But I remember her as a glorious exception to the norm – the majority were wilfully misrepresented.

17 Jun 2008

An active regulator

The SRA's tough new approach to regulation is too intrusive, says David Mayhew

3 Jun 2008

Cafcass blighted by understaffing and poor training, say family lawyers

Family lawyers in the South East have expressed little surprise at Ofsted's criticism of Cafcass services in the region but say the findings reflect unfairly on the effort deployed by overstretched teams trying to do their best in a context of chronic understaffing.

27 May 2008

Civil litigation brief

Gordon Exall looks at the procedure and guidelines governing the transfer of actions from the county court to the Technology and Construction Court

19 May 2008

Update: sentencing

Barbara Barnes reviews the latest cases on dangerousness, young offenders, concurrent or consecutive sentences, young offenders and child pornography

19 May 2008

Life in crime

Benjamin Newton discusses a recent Court of Appeal case that considered whether the defence of doli incapax was still available to defendants aged from 10 to 14 years

14 Dec 2007

Unrestricted development

The Lawntown ruling shows how developers can overcome restrictive covenants in order to convert single properties into multiple units, says David Jackson