About I find it difficult when discussing law to convey the strange mix of excitement and stress when I am doing a case. When read in a certain (perverse?) way, legal textbooks and practitioners’ text can be exciting. Lord Sumption has commented on air that “Law is nothing but common sense with bolts on”: but what strange and wonderful bolts. In ordinary life, however argumentative, there are only so many conflicts we can get into and so many arguments one can make....

The number of law graduates and qualified lawyers has shot up over the years, in Hong Kong as elsewhere. When Patrick Yu joined the Hong Kong Bar in 1953, there were only around 15 barristers. Now there are usually around 100 pupil barristers each year. It is a common complaint that there are now “too many” lawyers. The basic argument (in so far as there is one) is that society’s resources should not be expended on training lawyers who then do not practice (or practice and then drop out after a few years)....

Law students are often encouraged to participate in moots, which are typically a mock legal argument in an imaginary appellate setting. Less often, mock trials are organised for them: the format is perhaps less popular because of the need to have mock witnesses (as well as the moot judges), which takes a lot more resources. And also because it is less easy to make an apples-for-apples comparison, so more difficult to have a hierarchy of competitions, the finals being held before eminent personages such as KCs or judges....

I have fond memories of reading Online Courts and the Future of Justice, and it was a stroke of luck to get a public ticket to LawTech UK Investor’s event 2024 and listen to Richard Susskind in person. In his key note address, Susskind made a point that he had also made in writing: people don’t want lawyers as such, they want legal services. If technology can replace the need for lawyers, customers will choose technology over lawyers....

The instructions came on Thursday: would I attend Court to defend a summary judgment hearing the following Wednesday? Indeed I would. In gist, the landlord (the other side) says the tenant has not paid rent and has refused to leave. So they ask us to pay the outstanding rent and leave. Not an unreasonable request. The client came in for conference on Friday and told a different tale. It had already left....

The answer is seemingly “no”, regardless of technical know-how. The licence terms of the main databases prohibit it. Apart from the commercial providers, the main sources of Hong Kong Judgments online are:- The Judiciary’s Legal Reference System HKLII But apparently neither website permits re-use of their data, e.g. in the manner that would enable the creation of a website similar to this web app. The Judiciary website says this, The copyright of this website rests with the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government....

Non-fiction Judges Recollections by Kemal Bokhary NPJ Another Disaster by Denys Roberts, former AG, CS, CJ in Hong Kong # How we are Judged by Benjamin T. M. Liu, Justice of Appeal I Rest My Case: A Memoir by Neil Kaplan, former judge of the Construction and Arbitration List * Justice without fear or favour : reflections of a Chinese magistrate in colonial Hong Kong (剛正不阿) by Magistrate Marjorie Chui Myself a Mandarin by Austin Coates, an Englishman unexpectedly appointed magistrate in a country district in the New Territories, where he was charged with applying Qing law to settle local disputes....

I am a huge fan of both Neil Duxbury and Brian Leiter. So my interest was piqued when I learned that Leiter saw Duxbury’s “Patterns of American Jurisprudence” as “philosophically feeble” and wrote a review essay about it. Leiter’s critical essay is fluent and informative, and makes me want to read Duxbury’s book even more! It seems the central difference between Leiter and Duxbury is whether you think there are objective answers to key philosophical questions in jurisprudence....

[Note on 28 Sep: I have realised the subject matter is far too ambitious and different senses of “good at her job” need to be properly broken down. But, taking the words directly from Andrew Healey, “I like keeping old writing online to look back on so that’s why it’s still here, in its glorious wrongness”] My unoriginal answer is that what makes a lawyer “good” is her ability to give the appearance of fairness to a set of facts: to tune up or down the shades of grey as the occasion requires....

I have often come across case management orders where the Master orders parties to obtain Counsel’s advice “on the whole matter” before a certain date. Usually the order is accompanied by an order that interlocutory applications are to be taken out by a certain date: presumably to encourage parties to seek Counsel’s opinion early and to discourage late interlocutory applications. But thinking through the matter on first principle, the phrase cannot literally require solicitors to go to Counsel for advice “on the whole matter” without more....