About 15 years back, after the Belgian Supreme Court recognised my contributions with a rank which doesn't really exist here, Legist, the Ministry of Justice asked me to join the beta test panel on a Government website which is becoming extensively used, legislation.gov.uk. It was quite frightening, as I was rubbing shoulders with some very senior advocates from huge law firms, but shows that the law, at any rate, is trying to shed its expensive mistique in becoming transparent. No longer do we have to rely on Common Law conceptions of fairness or sending deluges of Postal Orders for hard copies, the ridiculous legal presumption that we know the Law at long last became feasible.
It's back-end is a huge database of all the applicable laws in the land, called StatuteLaw. My major contribution was retroactivity, as the law applying to something that happened is the law as it stood at that time - no shifting the goalposts.
One of my comments in the wash-up of the beta phase is that although this was a good start, we needed to go further, as the legislation only tells us what the Law says, it doesn't tell us what it means: for that we need Precedent, the accumulation of case law decisions, worked through in Appeals and the gamut of Court and Tribunal hearings. Historically, the Law Report has covered the major interpretations, but it's unstructured.
In any case, I've just followed up on comments Joshua Rosenberg made on his new YT blog, indicating that my recommendation is being acted upon, CaseLaw has been under construction for a couple of years in Alpha Phase, so I'd estimate it might be available in the medium term. This will be immensely valuable in showing us lines of argument which have or have not succeeded, in self-advocacy.
My next step's going to be the request for a Roget hyperlinkage of subject areas, so implicit connections between domains like subcontracting and the Law of Agency, and the new extension of Eminent Domain in the US in response to the general population being left holding the bill after the cops trash the place in the course of a welfare check become obvious to the man in the street. That one of my past colleagues' chums, Rusty Firmin, has been briefing American SWAT teams on SAS tactics is troubling: those were aimed at active terrorists, not befuddled 90 year olds trying to report inequity (Marion County, KY: the poor reporter dropped dead of a heart attack the next day, and there's hell to pay).
In any case, although I don't know where it goes from here under a new Government, it's certainly the kind of idea Labour supports, as it removes knowledge and therefore power from a wealthy and sometimes entitled clique of KCs, and allows us to advocate for ourselves, in due course. Any other thoughts of an applicable nature will be read with interest.
It's back-end is a huge database of all the applicable laws in the land, called StatuteLaw. My major contribution was retroactivity, as the law applying to something that happened is the law as it stood at that time - no shifting the goalposts.
One of my comments in the wash-up of the beta phase is that although this was a good start, we needed to go further, as the legislation only tells us what the Law says, it doesn't tell us what it means: for that we need Precedent, the accumulation of case law decisions, worked through in Appeals and the gamut of Court and Tribunal hearings. Historically, the Law Report has covered the major interpretations, but it's unstructured.
In any case, I've just followed up on comments Joshua Rosenberg made on his new YT blog, indicating that my recommendation is being acted upon, CaseLaw has been under construction for a couple of years in Alpha Phase, so I'd estimate it might be available in the medium term. This will be immensely valuable in showing us lines of argument which have or have not succeeded, in self-advocacy.
My next step's going to be the request for a Roget hyperlinkage of subject areas, so implicit connections between domains like subcontracting and the Law of Agency, and the new extension of Eminent Domain in the US in response to the general population being left holding the bill after the cops trash the place in the course of a welfare check become obvious to the man in the street. That one of my past colleagues' chums, Rusty Firmin, has been briefing American SWAT teams on SAS tactics is troubling: those were aimed at active terrorists, not befuddled 90 year olds trying to report inequity (Marion County, KY: the poor reporter dropped dead of a heart attack the next day, and there's hell to pay).
In any case, although I don't know where it goes from here under a new Government, it's certainly the kind of idea Labour supports, as it removes knowledge and therefore power from a wealthy and sometimes entitled clique of KCs, and allows us to advocate for ourselves, in due course. Any other thoughts of an applicable nature will be read with interest.
