A round-up of today's law matters in brief
Law seminar to focus on parole process
A seminar on Prison Law: The Parole Process will take place on March 26th in the Distillery Building, Church Street, Dublin, from 5pm to 7pm.
Speakers include: Gordon Holmes, chairman of the Parole Board; Diarmuid Griffin of NUI Galway, and a member of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission consultative group; and Roger Sweetman SC, a member of the Human Rights Commission.
The seminar is hosted jointly by the Irish Penal Reform Trust, the Irish Criminal Bar Association and the Dublin Solicitors’ Bar Association, and will be followed by a reception.
It follows a seminar on prison discipline hosted by the Irish Penal Reform Trust last April and it is hoped that the series will become a regular fixture, with three to four events a year.
Further details on www.iprt.ie, www.icba.ie or www.dsba.ie
UCC’s evening law degree
Another cycle of University College Cork’s evening law degree, the longest-running of its kind, will start in September this year, and applications are now invited for the course.
An information evening will take place on March 18th at 7pm, in Boole 3, UCC, and applications close on Friday, March 27th.
An assessment test will take place on April 6th at 7pm in Boole 4, UCC.
Further information and application forms are available at: www.ucc.ie/law
Judge Michael Kirby retires
Judge Michael Kirby retired from the Australian high (supreme) court last month.
Australia’s first openly gay judge, he had served on state and federal courts for 33 years and on the high court for 12 years. A distinguished reforming judge and proponent of human rights, he held the record for the highest number of dissenting judgments in the history to the high court.
A frequent visitor to Ireland, Judge Kirby was well known internationally.
He was a former president of the International Commission of Jurists and served on a number of UN commissions.
He was the keynote speaker at the launch of the shadow report on Ireland’s record under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights published last year.
Hugh Fitzpatrick lecture
Susan M Parkes, FTCD, former senior lecturer in education at Trinity College Dublin, will deliver the 20th Hugh M Fitzpatrick lecture on legal bibliography on Helen Blackburn: the social and political library of a 19th-century feminist reformer on March 24th at 7.30pm.
The lecture will take place in the Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street, Dublin, and will be chaired by Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness, president of the Law Reform Commission.
Solicitors abroad
A sign of the times – the current issue of the Law Society Gazette carries the first of a two-part series on seeking legal work abroad.