BEEN THERE, DONE THAT


Another lawyer to win at a beauty pageant, this time Miss Florida has been crowned Ms America 2004. An aspiring lawyer from Orlando, Erika Dunlap, however lost the gift of the gab upon being crowned and instead of a winner’s speech, was quoted as having been hyperventilating, as she repeated the words, ‘Oh my God,’ again and again.

Dunlap, who wants to specialise in entertainment and sports law after studies at the University of Central Florida, was not speechless earlier on, having crooned the inspirational anthem ‘If I Could’, which also won her the pageant’s talent contest.

SAVING OUR CHILDREN

Whilst the theme of this year’s Law Awareness Weekend (‘LAW’) was ‘The Child and the Family’, children elsewhere have become the hot topic. In a sermon at the National Festival Service of the Children’s Society in Canterbury Cathedral, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams expressed sharp criticisms of the youth justice system and its inability to differentiate between adults and the young.

We are required to face the fact that, for all our corporate sentimentality about childhood and for all our well-meant protocols about the protection of children, thousands of our children in Britain are invisible and their sufferings unnoticed.

It’s a Dog’s World


Photo credit: Larry Kahn

It has been said that the legal profession has become somewhat dog-eat-dog in recent years, but this sign, seen in the United States isn’t quite what we had in mind!

 

EGG IN YOUR FACE

More quotable quotes from the Honourable Chief Justice, this time no doubt sending a litigant-in-person scrambling for cover when she appeared before the Court of Appeal (presided over by his Honour) to seek an upward adjustment of an earlier award of $25m to her, as her share of matrimonial assets. In dismissing her appeal, his Honour was reported (see The Straits Times, 25 September 2003) to have quipped ‘You probably came here thinking we’d be sympathetic. We are very hard-boiled people. We just sentenced somebody to death this morning.’ Ouch.