Office is a "house", Lord Neuberger decides
The Court of Appeal ruling is likely to trigger a wave of enfranchisement claims by commercial tenants seeking to buy the freehold of their properties on favourable terms.
Expert Witness Legal News
Applications double for post of district judge
The number of applications from solicitors for the post of civil district judge has doubled in a year, the Judicial Appointments Commission has said.
Earlier this year the JAC reported a “huge rise” in the number of lawyers applying to be employment tribunal judges and fee-paid recorders (see solicitorsjournal.com 10 February 2010).
Open family justice reforms could leave public less informed, Munby LJ warns
Former justice secretary Jack Straw’s reforms aimed at opening up the family courts to the media and the public could leave people less informed, Lord Justice Munby has warned.
Munby LJ, a senior family judge, said the overall impact of the reforms and Part 2 of the Children, Schools and Families Act 2010, if implemented by the new government, was “difficult to predict, not least given the complexity and technicality of the new statutory provisions”
Government’s stop and search appeal blocked by Europe
Human rights judges have refused to reconsider their verdict that British stop-and-search legislation violated the right to privacy.
Rejecting the government’s application for a final appeal before the Grand Chamber, the European Court of Human Rights is now considering what remedies it should instruct the Home Office to undertake to resolve its breach of the convention.
Supreme Court rules out human rights in war as “novel”
A soldier who died of heat exhaustion while fighting in Iraq was not protected by the Human Rights Act, the Supreme Court has ruled.
Throwing out the claim, Lord Phillips said: “The contention that a state’s armed forces, by reason of their personal status, fall within the jurisdiction of the state for the purposes of article 1 is novel.”