A holding post, there is heavier stuff to come.
These bollards mark the City of London – the square mile. (I did not go to the Lady Mayor’s Show today). It seems there is a book about them now, Bollardology. They are described as distinctive black bollards with their red stars and lemon-squeezer tops. I expect there is more to be known.
Last Tuesday I saw something strange in Chiswell Street.
The weblog has successfully moved to Hostinger UK. Domainfactory is in the process of migrating sites and email accounts elsewhere, which I was too stupid to see coming, despite their April email to me. Still, the rest of the site and the email will probably follow.
I will continue to post occasionally. How far the posts will relate to legal translation I can’t say. It does seem odd that my main achievement and work interest for forty years was something it’s very hard to make a living from now and for writings about which there is probably no public. But who knows?
This site is currently being moved to a UK provider – and not deleted. Further signs of life may be expected.
A few notes, just in case I don’t stop blogging
1. Bernstein
Richard K. Bernstein died on 15 April 2025, the 22nd anniversary of my blog. Obituaries are available. He was 90, so he made it longer than Pope Francis.
Richard Bernstein’s diabetes book tells a fascinating story: at 12, in 1946, diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Pumped full of insulin. In his early thirties, alive but with health problems. An engineer. The first diabetic to test his own blood sugar at home. Not allowed to buy a testing device, but his wife was a doctor. It weighed 8 kilos, I think (this is all from memory. Tested several times a day and developed a strict low-carbohydrate diet, his health problems vanished and he lived a normalish life.
As a non-physician he was not able to publish his findings. He therefore qualified as a doctor himself and was able to publish, and set up a diabetes practice himself.
I accidentally stumbled on his death notice when I was thinking about diabetes as I had decided to try an NHS prediabetes course. My eldest brother was diagnosed in his 50s. I am not so insulin resistant and have been prediabetic on and off for years. The course is run by something called “Thrive Tribe”. Enough said.
2. Upminster
Diamond Geezer on Upminster as the Easternmost part of London, for Easter!
He has done all the anoraky stuff on establishing which shopping parade is the easternmost in London – it’s in Cranham. He has the easternmost Caffé Nero – for some reason he overlooked Costa, but the local man has a reputation for not letting his staff have tips etc. so that’s OK.
Die Welt, 18 April 2025
Building for a new housing area in Stein uncovered the centre of Wallenstein’s camp in 1632, which was over 16 km long. 13,000 trees had to be felled for it. There were three gallows and a wheel with the body parts of someone who had been quartered.
Wallenstein residierte im Süden des Lagers in einem zerlegbaren Holzhaus. Aus Böhmen war seine silberne Badewanne mitgebracht worden. Golo Mann vermerkt, dass der Generalissimus Kräuterbäder nahm, gerne Rebhühner aß und Weizenbier trank. Vermutlich auch Erdbeeren genoss, es war ja Erdbeerzeit.
Gustav Adolf was established in Nuremberg and Wallenstein aimed to starve his army out.
I just accidentally noticed this significant date. I may remove this whole blog from the Web in the near future as I am no longer updating it and its post-Brexit survival on a German site with UK registration is complicating my life. It’s been fun!
Two photos from Fürth.
In the Jewish Museum there is one room whose roof can be removed and replaced by branches, where the family who lived there could stay during the Feast of Tabernacles (Laubhüttenfest/Sukkot). This is a shot of it:
This is a balcony in Friedrichstraße – according to the famous FürthWiki this is a tabernacle, built in 1907: “Balkonanbau, vermutlich Sukka, von Adam Egerer, 1907″:
And here is an advert for the Fürth football team, Greuther Fürth, as seen in Nuremberg Airport in both February and September 2023:
I know things are bad in this country – I know courts have been closed (even without containing RAAC), I know legal aid has been cut, I know prisons are overcrowded (while the government calls for more and harsher sentences) – but this still doesn’t sit very well with me.
A court in Karlsruhe decides against extradition of Albanian man ‘in view of the state of the British prison system’.
A German court has refused to extradite to the UK a man accused of drug trafficking because of concerns about prison conditions in Britain, in what is thought to be the first case of its kind.
This was the Oberlandesgericht.
Karlsruhe higher regional court in south-west Germany made its decision earlier this year, and it has only recently been made public.
A translation of the court report said: “The court decided that the extradition of the Albanian to Britain was ‘currently inadmissible’. Without British guarantees, extradition is not possible in view of the state of the British prison system. There are no legal remedies against this.”
The man was arrested by German police and held in extradition custody.
His defence lawyer, Jan-Carl Janssen had studied in Glasgow and had written a thesis that looked at UK prison conditions.
In court, Janssen cited his research about chronic overcrowding, staff shortages and violence among inmates in British prisons. On the back of this evidence, the German court sought reassurances on two occasions from the UK authorities about prison conditions there.
The court said guarantees from the UK of compliance with minimum standards in accordance with the European convention on human rights were required. In addition, the court asked the British authorities to specify which prisons the Albanian man was going to be detained in and what his conditions of detention would be in those prisons.
A police station in Manchester replied to the court’s first request on the final day of the deadline for a response, saying 20,000 extra prison places were being built to deal with the problem of overcrowding. The second request for reassurance about UK prison conditions received no response from the UK.
…Since the UK is no longer a member of the EU, the rules of the European arrest warrant no longer apply.
It does look as though similar decisions have been made in Ireland and the Netherlands. It does sound rather weak to promise that the UK is building prisons for 20,000 more people.
From the Frankfurter Rundschau:
In dem neueren Fall hatte der Verdächtige einen Anwalt, der so etwas wie ein Experte für den Zustand der britischen Gefängnisse war. Jan-Carl Janssen schrieb seine Dissertation über das Strafvollzugssystem in England, Wales und Schottland und führte vor Gericht seine Untersuchungen zu Themen wie chronische Überbelegung, Personalmangel und Gewalt unter Insassen an. Er sagte auch, dass einige Zellen zu klein, zu dunkel und schlecht belüftet sind.
That’s a one-year LL.M. dissertation btw.
Here is Jan Carl Janssen and here is his book on prison conditions.
LATER NOTE: A report on this case on Udo Vetter’s blog, with four comments (glad the UK is out of the EU, especially because the right of silence has been weakened). Not yet references to how a prisoner escaped from Wandsworth last week. Udo gives the file number of the German case: 301 OAus 1/23
(Excuse the lack of spaces between sections – I don’t understand the latest edition of WordPress)
On the platform formerly known as Twitter, Mary Aspinall-Miles (followed by 27 people I follow) wrote:
May I ask a question about criminal justice language: When did the word “perpetrators/perp” start getting wide-scale use in the UK generally?
After the pandemic when we all started watching too many US cop shows on Netflix?
Has it though? I don’t hear this at work: it’s suspect / offender / nominal / defendant; and very occasionally accused / subject / target / person of interest. I think it may be more common in victim support services, maybe ?
In the light of concerns about the Ben Butler case in June 2016, this post by Sarah Phillimore attempts to explain the law that will apply in the family courts when a child has been hurt and there are a number of adults who could have done it – the so called ‘pool of perpetrators’.
In Re B (Children: Uncertain Perpetrator) [2019] EWCA Civ 575, [2019] 2 FLR 211 (“Re B: 2019″), Peter Jackson LJ clarified the proper approach in respect of uncertain perpetrator cases and the concept of a pool of perpetrators.
A person who perpetrates something, esp. a crime or evil deed.
Estemed as menquellers and perpetratours of most wicked factes.
, Actes & Monumentes (revised edition) vol. I. 110/2
…
The actor or absolute perpetrator of the crime.
, Commentaries on Laws of England vol. IV. iii. 341796…What is often said..of other crimes..if the perpetrator be sufficiently illustrious, it becomes a virtue.
, Book-hunter (1863) 1831951Harington was the Queen’s godson—clever,..naughty, a light~weight, perpetrator of puns and practical jokes.
, English Past 241995
He wanted the perpetrators captured and executed.
, Op-center xx. 100
Terrence R. Carney, of the University of South Africa, has published Linguistics for Legal Translation (thanks to Juliette Scott in her From Words to Deeds blog). The book can be downloaded free of charge as a PDF.
The book is intended not for scholars of linguistics but for legal practitioners.
The focus is statutory interpretation, though constitutional interpreters and interpreters of contracts might also gain from this text. Furthermore, I wrote the book specifically for those who must clarify lexical semantic and pragmatic meaning contested in case law, but who have no official training in linguistics or language studies. More precisely, the book aims at providing a resource for those who attempt forensic lexicological investigations in order to resolve legal disputes.
The book has a particular interest in the use of dicionaries and legal corpora. It is rather strange to read case reports where judges alight on a particular dictionary – whether monolingual or bilingual – and treat it as gospel. So one may hope that some of them come across this book and have time to read it.
Boris Johnson called the House of Commons Privileges Committee a kangaroo court. In fact, the term seems to be frequently used. It wasn’t part of my vocabulary and I wondered what it had to do with kangaroos. Apparently the origin is not certain, but it may have to do with leaping over the official route of something, or of an impromptu court moving from place to place.
Here is the Oxford English Dictionary on the term:
kangaroo court n. originally U.S. an improperly constituted court having no legal standing, e.g. one held by strikers, mutineers, prisoners, etc.