Handakte WebLAWg links to the latest version of the UK Yearbook (2004) online.

I can remember when this book was only available as an expensive hardback. I remember once or twice buying it, despite the expense, to teach British background studies. The best thing was the maps. Now the whole thing is online. It used to be called Britain Yearbook, now it is UK Yearbook. Here is the best page to see what’s on offer. And here are the colour maps as a PDF file.

I love the way the Commonwealth is coloured green – it was always pink when I was at school.

The German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitution Court) recently decided that a German court could refuse to serve process in an American case where punitive damages were claimed. There was a time when such service was routinely refused in Germany; later, there was a change in the other direction; this present case relates only to a preliminary injunction and its effects are not clear.

There is an article on this subject by Bettina Friedrich in the new edition of the German Law Journal:

bq. … From the perspective of a German-trained attorney (and her clients), the most perplexing elements of American Procedural law are pre-trial discovery, disclosure of documents, written witness-statements followed by cross-examination, class-action suits and punitive damages. … From the perspective of an American-trained attorney, the perplexing element is that German Procedural Law is not familiar with these elements. …

bq. [3] For the German-trained lawyer, the ideas related to these elements often stem from novels like Jonathan Carr’s “A Civil Action,” movies like “The Pelican Brief” and “The Firm,” or Court TV. Their unfamiliarity renders them inherently suspicious. This suspicion influences debates about service of judicial documents and recognition of foreign judgments, particularly when punitive damages are at stake. The inconsistent fear of “Americanization of procedural rules” is used as a “striking argument” in debates related to the (new) Sec. 142 (3) Zivilprozessordnung (German Civil Procedure Code – ZPO). … It is a permanent topic in International Arbitration, particularly in discussions related to the ICC Rules. It is of particular interest if the ICC Rules provide for disclosure of documents in an “American style.”

The German Law Journal has been online for four years now and is still looking for funding so it can remain free of charge. It would also like to introduce a paper edition.

There is an interesting Christmas market in the old town in Fürth, but it hasn’t started yet.

However, the Nuremberg Christkindlsmarkt (Christchild market) did open on Friday. It can be seen here (German and English). It starts with a teenage schoolgirl dressed up as a sort of angel, called the Christkind but rather too old for swaddling clothes, reciting a rather weak speech about the Christmas spirit. (Why not have a boy for once?). She doesn’t have to go to school for the next few weeks but has various official duties. Here is an excerpt in German and translation from the website (translation NOT by me!):

bq. In jedem Jahr, vier Wochen vor der Zeit,
Da man den Christbaum schmückt und sich aufs Feiern freut,
Ersteht auf diesem Platz, der Ahn hat´s schon gekannt,
Was Ihr hier seht, Christkindlesmarkt genannt.

bq. Dies Städtlein in der Stadt, aus Holz und Tuch gemacht,
So flüchtig, wie es scheint, in seiner kurzen Pracht,
Ist doch von Ewigkeit. Mein Markt bleibt immer jung,
Solang es Nürnberg gibt und die Erinnerung.

bq. In every year, four weeks before the time
When Christmas trees we decorate, and everyone awaits the feast,
Here on this square, just as of yore, this market does appear,
Which up and down the country they call Christmas Markt.
This little town is built from wood and canvas
Its splendour’s short, will soon be gone,
But yet it is eternal. My market is forever young,
As long as Nuremberg does exist, as long as you remember it.

The booths sell a restricted range of things: Christmas decorations, prune figures, mulled wine, toys. Apparently in the old days, many other things were sold, such as braces and shoelaces, but these were banned. I wonder if that was in 1933, which is the date when the Christkind’s Prologue and the market as it is today were created – part of the Third Reich propaganda of Nuremberg as the traditional city of German Christmas.

Meanwhile, there is a more everyday Christmas market in Fürth on the Fürther Freiheit. One presumably Christmassy touch is a pen with some sheep. They were soaking wet to the touch but didn’t seem disturbed by it.

At Elektro Götz you can get electric lights for dolls’ houses that really work. I don’t know where you plug them in, though.

Elektro-Götz hat echte Elektro-Lampen für Puppenhäuser, allerdings braucht man noch eine Steckdose dazu.

You can even get a TV, but I have a feeling it doesn’t work.
Der Fernseher funktioniert aber wahrscheinlich nicht.

bq. It was not without get regret, that I resolved on leaving the colony, because I had believed that my knowledge of the language and habits of the natives, acquired during my sojourning amongst them, might have led to my being employed by the local authorities during the rest of my life; but, when I reflected on the suspicion with which I was viewed by the most influential white men, and on the probable doubt the natives would entertain in my sincerity after having left them. I thought it best to retire to Van Diemen’s Land.

In 1802, when he was 20, William Buckley was sentenced to imprisonment for stealing a bolt of cloth. He escaped from imprisonment in Australia in 1803, and failing to find Sydney, he spent the next 33 years among the aborigines.

bq. In 1835 William Buckley appeared at the camp site of John Batman’s Port Phillip Association with a party of aboriginals who had told him about the sighting of a ship at Indented Heads.
He sat down. Waves of emotion swept over him. He felt weak and overwhelmed. How would he be received? He sweated with fear … He had his spears and hunting gear and wore possum skin clothing.
He had great difficulty being understood for he had forgotten his English language. Buckley could not understand their spoken English. He was offered bread. The word cleared a cloud from his brain. He understood further words. They tumbled over and over in his head as his native tongue came flooding back to him … The white men fed him and treated him with kindness. He showed them W.B. tattooed on his arm, and told them his story … [many inverted commas removed]

(from Australian Museums and Galleries Online by way of plep).
Here’s one of the pages, but the site is slow to load. Good contemporary illustrations. But it sounds as if Buckley had lost his A language…

I am a sucker for books like Scott Turow’s One L, as gripping as any thriller, on law school in the USA. So I finished Alex Wellen’s Barman recently.

Wellen doesn’t write about the first year of law school and the Socratic method – presumably One L and The Paper Chase have filled that slot.
He emphasizes that he studied at a ‘second-tier’ law school and concentrates on job searches, the bar exam and the first couple of years of employment in New York at an intellectual property firm (his first degree was in engineering). He has a weblog about tours to sell the book.

The book was a real page-turner most of the way through. The sections on job interviews (invidious questions you can only answer wrong, choosing what to wear) and the bar exam (with details of the kinds of question and the difficulties of answering) were the best for me, and the process of writing for law review, summer internship and starting work were informative. What I was less interested in was what seemed like a fair amount of fill-in: Wellen has a line in slapstick, extending to the behaviour of the washing machine on a backpacking holiday in Europe, and moving into a run-down New York loft entailing a spell of building labour before it was habitable.

I had heard of the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) but never in detail. Wellen writes:

bq. In any jurisdiction across the United States, lighting a warehouse on fire would be considered arson, but under the law tested on the MBE, it wasn’t. This was the bar administrator’s attempt to level the playing field. By establishing a special set of laws, what I referred to as the “bar code,” nearly every law student … was theoretically on equal footing …
The bar code was an imaginary set of tens of thousands of outdated, antiquated laws that everyone needed to be familiar with for the single purpose of passing the bar. For most of us, the laws were inconsistent with anything we’d learned in school and would have no practical application when it came to practicing law.

That makes the book sound a lot drier than it is. You can read some at amazon.com. It’ll be off to ebay for mine soon though.

Another law book not so easy to classify that I need to re-read is Lawrence Joseph’s Lawyerland. What lawyers talk about when they talk about law. It’s a curious fly-on-the-wall look at, or rather listen to, New York lawyers.

Finally, the House of Butter reports a new genre: the Christian legal thriller.

bq. Charlotte based lawyer, Robert Whitlow, is working on his 5th Christian legal thriller. His last Life Support sold 35,000 copies and his 2001 novel, The Trial sold 90,000 copies.

Here’s the source:

bq. All his novels feature Southern lawyers grappling with faith and ethics. His overarching theme, he said, is that “God is real and wants to interact with us.”

Kafka would have been mystified. I wonder if I could create a genre of German legal thrillers where people with websites are targeted by lawyers suing them for not having an Impressum?