Law

The scene is now set for a battle over the costs of the case. Estimates have been put at as much as £50m by Mail figures, though other sources close to the case said the real costs could be a small fraction of that amount, following previous court rulings.

However, it is understood that whatever the outcome, Lawrence, who was persuaded to join the legal action by Prince Harry and his legal team, will not have to pay any share of the costs of the failed case.

“Nobody, least of all the duke, who is very protective over Doreen, is going to see her out of pocket,” said a source familiar with the matter.

As I understand it they are jointly and severally liable for common costs, then there are some singular costs on top they are individually liable for.

The joint and severally bit means that they’ve got to make sure all of those common costs are covered if Lawrence isn;t going to have to pay any of it. They can’t just cut out her share and make sure that’s paid. They’ve got to make sure Hughes, Frost and so on cough up and so *all* those costs are paid so she’s safe.

Which is going to be fun.

There were, what, 7 people in the case against the Daily Mail? Whoi now face a £50 million legal bill?

Dunno if that’s including their own costs or just the Mail’s costs. Apparently there’s some insurance around somewhere. But I’m dubious about whether that really exists. Certainly dubious about how much of anything it would cover.

So, that’s £7 million each to find – minus whatever the insurance is.

Prince Harry, Elton John, David Furnish, Elizabeth Hurley, Sadie Frost and Baroness Doreen Lawrence

One, mebbe two, of those could get wiped out, no?

A fundamental principle is that you’re charged,tried and punished under whatever the law was at the time of the offence, not whatever happened to the law after you dunnit.

Alex Norris, the Home Office minister, said “all options are on the table” when asked in the Commons whether the Government could fast-track legislation to pave the way for the removal of Shabir Ahmed.

Ahmed, 73, was released from prison last week after serving 14 years of a 22-year sentence for 30 child rape offences. He cannot be returned to Pakistan despite being stripped of his UK citizenship.

He has avoided deportation because the Immigration Act 1971 exempts Commonwealth citizens such as Ahmed who came to Britain before 1973 and have lived here for at least five years.

Yes, yes, we all want ‘im gone etc. And yet he is indeed protected by that law. So, that’s that I’m afraid.

We could get all Roper etc. But consider this. Given the cunts who gain power in this country anyone really want them to be able to change the law retrospectively and so nail I, you, we, us?

Quite….

While dowries have been banned in India since 1961, demands from a bridegroom’s family persist and remain widespread, according to the research, and women who fail to provide them can face abuse, harassment and, in some cases, murder.

Doesn’t mean people are going to obey the laws that you make. A useful thought about taxes, censorship, social media and so on…..

The kind of regulation we need is not new: a licensing regime that requires a minimum safety standard before a system can be built and released. This is how we handle nuclear power, airplanes, buildings, elevators, hairdressers and sandwich makers. Is it too much to ask of trillion-dollar AI corporations, who claim to be building the most dangerous technology in history?

You need this to apply to all models, globally, forever. Which ain’t gonna happen, is it?

Ricardo Gama, a partner at the law firm Leigh Day, which is representing

So we know that argument, whatever it is, is bollocks then, don’t we?

Its consultation proposed that the HSE should be allowed to fast-track chemical hazard classifications from other countries into British law. When the HSE published its response to the consultation findings, it said it would recognise the EU’s standards when adopting such hazard classifications. The EU has the highest standards on chemical safety globally.

But when the government laid the regulations before parliament earlier this year, the EU and its standards were not mentioned. Fighting Dirty is taking legal action against the government over concerns that this omission may expose the public to more hazardous chemicals.

Ricardo Gama, a partner at the law firm Leigh Day, which is representing Fighting Dirty in the proceedings, said the absence of this “safeguard” meant the government, or any future government, “could approve chemicals from places that have lower standards than the UK and EU”.

And, you know, how in buggery did this become justiciable? And who’s paying for it, obviously.

Shabana Mahmood’s plan to house more asylum seekers in former army barracks is facing a major hurdle after the high court ruled that a policy change forcing torture victims to share rooms was unlawful.

According to a judgment seen by the Guardian, the government failed in its duties when it forced survivors of trafficking, torture and other serious forms of violence to share rooms with strangers.

This was done – obviously – on the public tenpence. Legal aid etc etc.

So, when do we get all Dick the Butcher on these people?

Seems a bit extreme:

Patagonia has launched a trademark lawsuit against an environmentalist drag queen named Pattie Gonia, who has accused the outdoor clothing company of “trying to erase an activist”.

Wyn Wiley, who performs as Pattie Gonia, has accumulated millions of followers online for their environmental activism, raising almost $4m for non-profits so far. Last year they raised $1m while hiking 100 miles in full drag from Point Reyes national seashore to San Francisco.

Patagonia, which takes its name from an enormous geographical region spanning Argentina and Chile, filed its trademark infringement lawsuit against Wiley on 21 January. The suit was filed to the federal court in Los Angeles.

I mean, really?

Ah:

The company, which is suing Wiley for a “nominal” $1 in damages plus legal fees, said that it took action after Wiley filed a trademark application in September to use the brand Pattie Gonia to sell clothing and promote environmental activism, which it claims would “irreparably harm” its brand.

Ah, no, that makes perfect sense. You do actually have to defend a trademark. Otherwise it fails. Pattie Gonia condoms, grape jelly or vacuum cleaners wouldn’t be a problem. But outdoor clothes, obviously, sue!

Britain used to have a lawyer writing to the newspapers. “Dear sir, I note you used then word bic, it is in fact, Bic, the trademark of…..yours etc, A Lawyer” on exactly the same basis. A trademark must be protected…..

The international criminal court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has been on an exoneration tour, with stops including an interview with Mehdi Hasan and an appearance at the Oxford Union. Accused by a lawyer in his office of repeated sexual misconduct, which he denies, he claims that an internal review of the allegations has vindicated him but the situation is more complex than that.

It has been a year since Khan took a leave of absence while the claims against him were investigated as an internal employment matter. That absence has left the ICC under the control of his deputies, with important decisions to be taken in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and elsewhere. Yet the ICC member states, which have ultimate authority over whether Khan stays or goes, have dawdled, acting as if they had all the time in the world. And the procedure that they relied on to resolve the matter turned out to be a travesty.

Who will watch the watchers and all that. So, the International Criminal Court cannot run its own affairs with what these internationally minded folk would call justice or even law. So, why in buggery bother with the court then?

Instead of making the credibility determinations needed to resolve this differing testimony, the OIOS delivered a 150-page “he said, she said” account.

That, in turn, was handed to a panel of three judges……The matter has now gone before the 21-member executive bureau of the Assembly of States Parties……The other option would be for the bureau to make its own credibility judgments, as reportedly 15 of the 21 bureau member states seem inclined to do……Some suggest that the complainant is acting at the behest of the Israeli government or its Mossad spy agency.

Oh, of course. The incredible efficiency of the international bureaucracy is all about The Jooos. Dust from orbit, it’s the only way.

Incompetent even:

Writing in 1943, the historian Henry Steele Commager delivered both a stern history lesson and a warning about the United States supreme court. The court, he said, had never been a friend to US democracy, and it never would be. For anyone committed to the advancement of majority rule, he added, judicial review “is wrong in theory and dangerous in practice”.

The danger that Commager noted was on full display on 29 April 2026, when the supreme court eviscerated section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As the Department of Justice explains, section 2 “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups … or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group”.

That’s what it does say and that’s exactly what the Supreme Court has just said it says. You can’t discriminate on hte basis of race in creating electoral districts that will likelky to won by someone of one race or anotyher. That’s racial discrimination and you cannot do it. Yea, even if the like race of the winner is something good and cuddly like Black of Hispanic or something.

Yer man here in The G is claiming that the court eviscerated that clause when in fact they confirmed it.

Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College,

Ah, well, Amhurst and reality have not been known to be in close contact for some time now.

If our culture wars are to reach a nadir, it may be this single, absurd moment: a white female influencer is moving to sue a positive action charity over anti-white discrimination.

If we say that you’re not allowed to discriminate on hte basis of race then that means we’ve said you are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race. This is not hard nor difficult to understand.

We do have laws against racial discrimination. So, do they wholly apply or not is an interesting question, no?

It is curious that Corcoran is advancing this case on the basis of the Equality Act. Indeed, it is this very piece of legislation that underpins schemes promoting diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI).

Quite. What does that law actually mean? Can you discriminate on the basis of race or not?

The purpose of this law is to enrch lawyers. Job done.

That’s because according to the court, it is now acceptable for voting districts to have racially discriminatory impacts so long as they cannot be proved to have racially discriminatory intent. Alito’s opinion overturns the 1982 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, which specifically said that voting district maps needed to be drawn in a way that preserved the equitable representation of racial minorities – and that mere discriminatory impact was sufficient to render maps illegal, with no evidence of discriminatory intent required. Discarding congressional intent entirely, Alito claims that this provision is itself unconstitutional, because in order to ensure equal representation for Black voters, redistricting bodies have to consider race. This, the court contended, constitutes discrimination against non-Black voters. Instead, a facially race-neutral – but in effect racially discriminatory – new regime has been imposed.

Well, yes. If race is not an acceptable measure of who votes in which district then race is not an acceptable measure of who votes in which district. That you like the current outcome doesn’t change this fact about racial discrimination.

It is difficult to say how many seats Democrats will lose in the coming Republican redistricting bonanza that the court’s decision will allow. A New York Times analysis found that the ruling would endanger about a dozen Democratic-leaning seats across the American south. A report by Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group led by the Georgia Democratic activist Stacey Abrams, says that Republicans could pick up as many as 27 seats.

So you’re saying that the current system of racial discrimination gives D 27 seats? Why is this good? Other than that you prefer Ds?

Three men were paid by a Russian speaking contact known as “El Money” to target Sir Keir Starmer in a series of arson attacks, a court has heard.
Roman Lavrynovych, 22, Petro Pochynok, 35, and Stanislav Carpiuc, 27 are accused of firebombing properties linked to the Prime Minister in May 2025.
On Wednesday, jurors were told the unknown Russian contact exchanged hundreds of messages with the individuals on Telegram in the months leading up to the attacks.
Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson KC said there was planning and “reconnaissance” before the attacks took place.
He added that the motivation was financial, and not driven by any “particular political or ideological” agenda.

Well, that’s the case they’re running with so it must all be true, right? There’s also a certain sensibleness to it – we know rent lads will do stuff for money so if you’re looking for people to do stuff then…..

Those, obviously, skills can be more or less transferrable.

Note this is still in court.

In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, the court rendered ineffective section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 has long been used to ensure minority voters are treated fairly in redistricting.

“Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,” Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, wrote for the majority opinion. “Compliance with section 2 thus could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here. The state’s attempt to satisfy the middle district’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

Gerrymandering against a racial group is bad. OK. Gerrymandering in favour of a racial group is bad. OK by me. For, obviously enough, gerrymandering in favour of whites – say and as an example – would be gerrymandering against blacks, and in favour of blacks against whites.

Positive racial discrimination is still racial discrimination, right?

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote the court had now accomplished a “demolition of the Voting Rights Act”. The court’s decision on Wednesday is the latest in a series that dismantled the law, she wrote, including a major decision in 2013 case, Shelby County v Holder, that nullified another major provision in the law that required places with a history of discrimination to get changes pre-approved by the federal government before they went into effect.

“Under the court’s new view of section 2, a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote in a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. In fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.

“Today’s decision renders section 2 all but a dead letter,” she continued. “The decision here is about Louisiana’s district 6. But so too it is about Louisiana’s district 2. And so too it is about the many other districts, particularly in the south, that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice. After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long.”

Kagan is judging this on the outcome she prefers. Which is not how a constitutional court is supposed to work – rather, to judge on whether the law meets the tests of the constitution. As with Dobbs. Not whether there’s some way we can legalise abortion using the constitution, but does the constitution say the Feds have power over abortion? If the answer to two is no then that’s that – a matter for the States. Racial discrimination is Bad, M’Kay? So, nope, don’t do that.

In the months after the invasion, Essar entered into complex offshore arrangements that appear to have enabled the group to keep dealing with a Russian bank under sanctions from the west.

Essar shifted billions of dollars in loans, provided by the Kremlin-controlled lender VTB, from Cyprus to a subsidiary in the tax haven of Mauritius, where sanctions did not apply.

The Cyprus and Mauritius entities that took part in the transfer included subsidiaries of Essar’s UK arm, Essar Energy.

Essar said that UK sanctions law did not apply to the transaction and that it complied with all applicable sanctions law after taking advice from a leading law firm. But the restructuring “raises red flags in relation to possible [sanctions] circumvention”, according to a leading expert.

If something’s legal, it’s legal, right?

The United Nations is reviewing whether Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos surrender breaches international human rights laws in what could jeopardise the deal.
Officials are assessing allegations that the Prime Minister is committing a “crime against humanity” for attempting to evict native Chagossians from the archipelago as part of his plans to cede the British territory to Mauritius.

The entire pay to give it away idea stems from the ‘uman rights lawyers. Hoist petard etc.

Of course, the reaction is going to be but, but, that’s not real ‘uman rights law, is it?

At least we still have juries, I hear you say? Well, only just. Juries, once held in high esteem by so-called political reformers, are the latest core democratic mainstay to be discarded for bogus and opportunistic reasons by this arbitrary and whimsical form of cabinet governance.

The bastards.

The English criminal jury system was developed and honed over the course of eight centuries. It has become the envy of the world as one of the fairest ways to determine guilt or innocence. A jury of 12 randomly chosen individuals has long been regarded as a vital bulwark against the excesses of government, the threats posed to basic human rights by oppressive legislation and, of course, arbitrary governance. It provides a constitutional and democratic safeguard unlike any other.

Quite so.

So, when do we get to hang them all?

This is from Sands. You know, the guy insisting we pay to give away Chagos. On the basis of a court ruling that does not, in law, apply to us nor our relations with Commonwealth countries?

That Sands, squealing about international law.

Donald Trump has ordered “a total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro.

So, we’ve all decided, internationally and legally, that here are sanctions. If people bust the sanctions – bust that international law – then what do we do? Arrest the sanctions breakers?

Seems logical, even fair, really. So, what’s the argument against this? Other than Trump bad, socialists good?