Sadakat Kadri is an associate tenant at Doughty Street Chambers.
The scandals that have engulfed News International over the past year have given us many memorable moments, but Rupert and James Murdoch’s appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons last July is first among them. While James cut a predictably bitter figure, his octogenarian father could hardly have seemed less like his ruthless public persona. The...
Arguments about Islam are liable to generate more heat than light wherever they take place, but one of the unlikelier hotspots over the last year was the state of Oklahoma. In 2010, a group of its Republican lawmakers proposed that local courts be forbidden from taking account of the sharia, and 70 per cent of voters backed a draft constitutional amendment to that effect. The law, known to supporters as the ‘Save our State’ amendment, was justified as a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against an imminent ‘onslaught’. Similar initiatives were soon spawning elsewhere, and by late 2011 they had been tabled in 24 legislatures, from Alabama to Wyoming.
As the number of wounded and killed has climbed in Egypt in recent days, a number of journalists and bloggers have reported that several of the tear gas canisters being fired at protesters in Tahrir Square carry blue ‘Made in USA’ stamps, and indications that they were made by a company based in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, called Combined Tactical Systems. Comparing a recently posted picture of one such shell with the illustrations on CTS’s website suggests it may well be a 40 mm projectile with the catalogue number 4230.
The misfortunes suffered by Muammar Gaddafi in Sirte on 20 October unfolded in a succession of confused online updates. A report of his capture in a firefight rapidly mutated into claims that crossfire somehow killed him as he was sped to hospital, or that his own bodyguards had shot him in the back. The fog of war was then pierced – or, more accurately, lit up – by a series of...
The anger may have subsided on the streets as hoodies, gangstas and other members of Kenneth Clarke’s ‘feral underclass’ retreated into the shadows after last month’s riots, but it soon burst out in courtrooms across England. The most egregious instance was the judge at Chester who gave two men without criminal records four-year prison terms for trying (and failing) to...
A modern criminal trial can be exceedingly inconvenient. The more fairly conducted it is, the less certain the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from...
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