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In Practice Obiter |
Vanuatu’s Prime Minister, Edward Natapei, lost his seat in Parliament last month due to a simple paperwork error, throwing the tiny Pacific nation’s politics into turmoil. Natapei forfeited his seat after missing three consecutive sittings without notifying the speaker due to a standing order that if you miss three consecutive meetings, your seat will be declared vacant. Natapei was rushing back from a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad and Tobago, while his cabinet went into emergency talks. To retain his seat, Natapei needed only to have handed in a signed explanation for his absence.
German police took a sample of the sauce from a kebab stand in Bremen’s central train station after a kebab salesman threw it into the eyes of a customer during a fight over napkins. Officers broke up a scuffle that kicked off after a 23-year-old wiped his kebab-soiled hands on the stand because the salesman refused to give him a paper napkin. The seller responded by flinging a ladle of sauce in the man’s face.
The victim’s eyes became bloodshot and according to the police, the question of whether the spiciness of the kebab sauce constituted “normal” or grievous bodily harm must now be addressed.
Malaysia’s eastern state of Terengganu is offering free honeymoons worth up to USD440 each to rekindle the romance between married couples on the brink of divorce. The honeymoon package comes with some counselling and is an attempt to slow soaring divorce rates in the state. A spokesman was quoted as saying, “We can understand newlyweds having problems understanding one another, where a slight skirmish could lead to a separation but it is unacceptable for those married more than two decades to file for divorce.”
Imagine opening your Inbox on a social networking site and finding an invitation – not to connect to an acquaintance, but to show up in court. That may be the direction that social networking is headed, at least in the aftermath of recent cases out of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom, where courts have granted lawyers permission to serve defendants with court documents via Facebook or Twitter.
In December 2008, a judge in Australia’s Supreme Court allowed lawyers from the Canberra-based firm Meyer Vandenberg to serve the papers via the site, after being satisfied that the profiles the lawyers had found did in fact belong to the defendants in question. The lawyers had not been able to find the defendants to allow for personal service, but the defendants’ Facebook profiles contained enough information to satisfy the court that it would provide a sufficient method of communicating with the defendants.
Yet another reason for why lawyers need to understand social networking.