Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
David Papineau, Professor of philosophy of science at King’s College London, writes in Aeon: Imagine that 100 prisoners are exercising in the prison yard, and suddenly 99 of them attack the guard, carrying out a plan that the 100th prisoner…
Late in April, Rwanda’s Supreme Court struck down a law criminalizing “defamation, insults and cartooning public officials” but upheld the clause that made insulting the president a crime. (In addition, the court refused to decriminalize adultery.) Specifically, Article 154 criminalizes…
Streetwise Professor (Craig Pirrong) explained spoofing on electronic exchanges in this post three years ago. Yesterday, he wrote about the US Department of Justice (DOJ) indicting a group of traders for alleged spoofing. The stunning part of the indictment is…
It’s hard to argue against Lee Kovarsky‘s position that DNA fingerprinting offers a cognitive method so powerful that no sane person, not even a judge, can honestly ignore all the discoveries made through its application. It’s likewise impossible to accept…
The late US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia was infamous, among other things, for writing (in Herrera v. Collins, 1993, concurring): There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in…
The appeals court has published its ruling in the Tommy Robinson case. The summary is particularly helpful but the full opinion is worth giving a good look as well. (Also see the discussions at Tim’s blog, here and here.) The appellate…
The Guardian reported on the latest twist in the bizarre trial in Germany known as the NSU-Prozess: Nearly five years into the trial of a German neo-Nazi gang who went on a killing spree against immigrants, relatives of the victims have…
Wednesday’s predictable but nevertheless bizarre re-conviction of Navalny and Ofitserov makes one wonder how the court managed the seemingly insurmountable barriers such as the absence of the corpus delicti and the ECHR’s ruling. It’s especially puzzling if, as Navalny has observed,…
It’s Groundhog Day for the Russian opposition and its informal leader: Alexei Navalny said the verdict at the retrial was copied word for word from his first conviction… As the judge read out the guilty verdict on Wednesday, Navalny tweeted out pages…
According to Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty (here’s a report from the BBC): Russia’s economic development minister [Alexei Ulyukayev] has been charged with large-scale bribe taking and placed under house arrest following his detention overnight in a case that has sent…
I learned of Robert Amsterdam when he was representing Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yukos as their international lawyer. Amsterdam’s relentless criticism of Russia’s legal system, which he witnessed in action at the first Yukos trial in 2003-4, was spot on but…
Erdoğan’s ongoing purge of the judiciary is unsurprising: apparently, an influential group of appellate judges was one of the few barriers left on his march to absolute power – although the magistrates’ motives may have little to do with the rule…