I still haven't found what I'm looking for

While I would still like to see something that allows me to easily cross search Athens resources, I have been using a little Firefox addon for a while which is fantastically useful. Dr. Evil's 'Add to Search Bar' creates a search bar entry for pretty much any website that has a search facility. It works well with sites like BAILII and you can use it with Westlaw as well, but so far I haven't been able to get it to play with LexisNexis. A bit more tweaking perhaps.

Christmas Party Food Safety Warning

Geeklawyer has been busy robustly defending Manchester Council's brave anti-photo policy and quite rightly too. Won't somebody please think of the children? Now Mrs Publawyer has pointed out a disturbing trend by the CPS to allow youngsters to roam the country hurling party snacks at all and sundry without fear of prosecution. While some will applaud this as a victory for common sense, I can see the darker and more disturbing side. Everyone knows that cocktail sausage assaults are the cannabis of the non-fatal offences ladder. Before you know it they'll be sharpening the corners of doritos and turning them into 3-point throwing stars and bludgeoning the unsuspecting with empty coke bottles with cocktail sticks inserted.

And before my other regular reader points out that this is an old story, I would like to highlight that this story did indeed break in August, but it is only this week that the CPS have decided to discontinue the case and as I only heard about that yesterday evening I have to work with what crumbs I can.

Following on from that revelation was a discussion on youth justice on Radio 4's 'Unreliable Evidence'. Lots of complaints, but not much in the way of workable solutions. A working party is all very well and good, but any ideas, any at all, for the way forward? Someone (I think he was a magistrate, but I can't get the Listen Again function to work to check it) appeared at one point to be just a well-timed Clive Anderson intervention away from advocating all out vigilante reprisals as the way to cure the defects in the youth justice system. Marvellous. Some mention was also made of the tendency of the police to arrest and charge youngsters even in trivial cases due to their targets etc, but why do the CPS make the decision to prosecute anyway?

"It’s a free country, i'n'it?”

Excellent stuff from Baroness Hale (at 112) as the House of Lords slapped down the Countryside Alliance's latest challenge against anti-hunting legislation this week. Head of Legal has some more serious analysis, but I want to know if the Lords will be completely embracing this kind of approach and soon be texting their speeches in. Presumably this fella would completely flip out at such a development. Assuming of course that he hasn't already.