Via Jurist’s Paper Chase, I found that a survey is being made to find out whether judges should dress more informally. A consultation paper has just been issued, but before that, a public opinion poll was held. People were shown three pictures of options for court dress, one of them (A) always being current dress. The pictures are bizarre: three each of a (female, Asian? the pictures are dark) barrister, a male criminal judge and a female criminal judge (is their dress not unisex?) and a civil judge, and two of a (black) court clerk. The civil judge is photographed at three distances, so he looks much bigger in the present dress than in the second of the possible dresses. Would this influence voters? In all cases, the wigs are fairly similar to the hair the person already has. I’m guessing that one criminal judge, the man, was a High Court judge, the woman a district judge, and the civil judge was a district judge.

I read in Blogcritics, who had it from Yahoo news, that a man has been arrested in ‘the southern German town of Fuerth’ (which is where I live) – 8 computers were taken from the house of a 25-year-old ‘computer student’ for ‘using a clone of a Napster file-sharing server to distribute over a million MP3 music files daily to some 3,000 individual users over a period of weeks’.
Incidentally, I hesitate to anglicize Fürth to Fuerth – it seems to me that the UE = Ü practice is a German one. After all, we write Zurich not Zuerich (well, I know that doesn’t prove anything.
The Fuerther Nachrichten is ignorant. It does have an article on local hunters opposing the reform of the hunting law, a subject I was thinking of writing about as a German peculiarity: ‘Die Naturschützer hatten unter anderem gefordert, die Zahl der jagdbaren Tiere auf Rotwild, Damhirsch, Sikahirsch, Reh, Gemse, Mufflon und Wildschwein einzuschränken und die Abschusspläne für so genanntes Schalenwild – dazu zählen alle Huftiere – abzuschaffen. „Diese Forderung dient erkennbar dem Zweck, aus Gründen der Waldwirtschaft das Triebe und Knospen verbeißende Rehwild auszurotten“, so Kretsch.’
(I must find a simple method of marking quotes).
The Nordbayern Infonet is also silent. Yahoo says the report came from Reuters in Berlin. All these papers say is that the football team may move up if it does well against Cologne, and that there is a new technology for cinema advertising being introduced, digital preparation (Wolf Werbung Fürth became RoWo).

I read in Blogcritics, who had it from Yahoo news, that a man has been arrested in ‘the southern German town of Fuerth’ (which is where I live) – 8 computers were taken from the house of a 25-year-old ‘computer student’ for ‘using a clone of a Napster file-sharing server to distribute over a million MP3 music files daily to some 3,000 individual users over a period of weeks’.
Incidentally, I hesitate to anglicize Fürth to Fuerth – it seems to me that the UE = Ü practice is a German one. After all, we write Zurich not Zuerich (well, I know that doesn’t prove anything.
The Fuerther Nachrichten is ignorant. It does have an article on local hunters opposing the reform of the hunting law, a subject I was thinking of writing about as a German peculiarity: ‘Die Naturschützer hatten unter anderem gefordert, die Zahl der jagdbaren Tiere auf Rotwild, Damhirsch, Sikahirsch, Reh, Gemse, Mufflon und Wildschwein einzuschränken und die Abschusspläne für so genanntes Schalenwild – dazu zählen alle Huftiere – abzuschaffen. „Diese Forderung dient erkennbar dem Zweck, aus Gründen der Waldwirtschaft das Triebe und Knospen verbeißende Rehwild auszurotten“, so Kretsch.’
(I must find a simple method of marking quotes).
The Nordbayern Infonet is also silent. Yahoo says the report came from Reuters in Berlin. All these papers say is that the football team may move up if it does well against Cologne, and that there is a new technology for cinema advertising being introduced, digital preparation (Wolf Werbung Fürth became RoWo).

While I was away, the German Law Journal appeared again. It’s a good resource to have online.
The very positive review of Basil Markesinis and Hannes Unberath, The German Law of Torts: a Comparative Treatise, ISBN 1-84113-297-7 (4th edition) reminded me what a wonderful book it is and that I never read enough of the third edition. Reading Markesinis’s faculty biography
at the University of Texas at Austin, I have a feeling he doesn’t need any advertising from me (he’s at University College London with a profile too). The book is expensive, but very full and very good. I recommend the review and will quote a small bit:
Germans are likely to learn much that is unexpected about themselves from the perspective of the foreign observer. It is understandable that the former president of the Federal Court of Justice, Walter Odersky, wrote such an appreciative, even grateful, foreword to the book: where else does German law find a platform with such a far-reaching, international impact?

While I was away, the German Law Journal appeared again. It’s a good resource to have online.
The very positive review of Basil Markesinis and Hannes Unberath, The German Law of Torts: a Comparative Treatise, ISBN 1-84113-297-7 (4th edition) reminded me what a wonderful book it is and that I never read enough of the third edition. Reading Markesinis’s faculty biography
at the University of Texas at Austin, I have a feeling he doesn’t need any advertising from me (he’s at University College London with a profile too). The book is expensive, but very full and very good. I recommend the review and will quote a small bit:
Germans are likely to learn much that is unexpected about themselves from the perspective of the foreign observer. It is understandable that the former president of the Federal Court of Justice, Walter Odersky, wrote such an appreciative, even grateful, foreword to the book: where else does German law find a platform with such a far-reaching, international impact?

I haven’t got round to a report yet, but here is a photo from beside the Hyatt Regency Hotel at Jersey City – the hotel is the building at the left.