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| Wednesday February 6 2019 |
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By Frances Gibb and Jonathan Ames
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Good morning.
Sensitive issues around religion and discrimination fell into the legal crosshairs yesterday when High Court judges ruled that a housing association and charity is allowed to turn away applicants who are not Orthodox Jews.
Lawyers at the Canary Wharf headquarters Barclays Bank in London are this week mourning the death of two of their colleagues in a devastating avalanche in Italy; and the Royal Opera House in London is bracing itself for a courtroom drama in which it is being sued for £200,000 over a falling curtain.
And see our Blue Bag diary for everything you’d ever want to know about being a high-flying divorce lawyer and new mother at the age of 50. All that and more in this morning’s must-read of all things legal, including news, comment and gossip.
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Today
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HOUSING ASSOCIATION CAN RENT ONLY TO ORTHODOX JEWS
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Linklaters blocks revelations over ‘culture’
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Law will force social media firms to remove suicide and self-harm images
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Comment: Get rid of amateur university justice
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| Tweet us @timeslaw with your views. |
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Story of the Day
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Housing association can rent only to Orthodox Jews
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A Jewish housing association has won a court battle allowing it to refuse homes to tenants who are not Orthodox Jews. The Agudas Israel Housing Association was founded in 1986 to provide social housing for Orthodox Jews in north London and does not accept applications from anyone outside the community. Lawyers for the association welcomed the ruling by the High Court as recognition by the judges that antisemitism in the UK was “widespread and increasing and overt”.
A non-Jewish woman who has four children, including two sons with autism and twin baby girls, was at the top of Hackney council’s list for a four-bedroom home in the area. Six four-bedroom properties owned by AIHA became available, but the single mother was not allowed to apply.
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Read the full story
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Comment
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Get rid of amateur university justice
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As a case of offensive messages at Warwick shows, academics need rigorous training to make fair disciplinary rulings, Daniel Sokol writes
Academic staff who make potentially life-changing decisions should receive rigorous training, ideally by lawyers or judges. Yet, they seldom do. A PhD or professorship is no substitute for such training, and neither is length of service on a panel. Acting incompetently for a long time is still incompetence.
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Read the full story
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News round-up
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Linklaters blocks revelations over ‘struggle with women’
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A “magic circle” law firm was granted a temporary order yesterday banning insider revelations over the practice’s “ongoing struggle” with women in the workplace.
A former senior business development executive at Linklaters had threatened to disclose confidential details about the firm to various undisclosed media organisations.
A High Court ruling from Mr Justice Warby revealed that Frank Mellish, an Australian in his late 50s, had intended to disclose at three examples of concern about the “culture” at Linklaters.
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Read the full story
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Law will force social media firms to remove suicide and self-harm images
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Social media companies are to be forced to sign legal agreements that require them to remove images and articles about self-harm, suicide and other harmful content to protect vulnerable users (writes Greg Hurst).
Ministers confirmed yesterday in the wake of the Molly Russell (pictured) case that voluntary codes of conduct dealing with online content have not worked and that the government will legislate to make companies act. Plans for a law were unveiled at a conference on internet safety in London by Margot James, the digital minister, which has been organised to mark Safer Internet Day.
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Read the full story
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‘Traumatised’ stage manager sues opera house over falling curtain
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Royal Opera House officials see plenty of drama on stage, but they will be less enthusiastic about a courtroom saga in which a stage manager suing them for £200,000. Gary Crofts, 68, claims that he has been plagued by depression and anxiety since a half-tonne section of stage curtain fell down near him without warning.
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Read the full story
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Barclays lawyer killed in Italian ski slope avalanche
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Matt Ziegler was one of two UK-based lawyers who were killed in an avalanche in the Italian Alps as a group of skiers were swept 300 yards down a mountain last weekend.
Mr Ziegler, 43, was an in-house lawyer for Barclays, based at the bank’s headquarters in London’s Canary Wharf. He qualified in 2004 at the London office of US law firm Cleary Gottleib, and had also done a stint in-house at Deutsche Bank.
Katherine Clarke, 39, from New Zealand, was also reported to be a lawyer based in London. Website Legal Week said that she was also with Barclays’ legal department, having previously been an associate at City law firm Ashurst.
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Read the full story
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In Brief
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- Government to pay law firm £800k in case Eurotunnel takes legal action over Brexit – The Independent
- Trimble raises funds for legal challenge against backstop – The Times
- ‘Social media behaves as if it is above the law’ – The Guardian
- British football fan faces 15 years in UAE jail for wearing Qatar shirt – The Times
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Comment
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Children Act has stood the test of time
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The law has withstood seismic shifts in British family values, but underfunded family courts are at breaking point, writes Jo Delahunty
The Children Act 1989 is now 30 years old — and while there are few gaps in the legislation, what needs to develop is the willingness of government to provide the funds to fulfil the ethos behind it.
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Read the full story
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Tweet of the day
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| COUNSEL: “My Lords, in this appeal, there are three points. One is arguable, one is hopeless, and one is unanswerable.”
PRESIDING JUDGE: “Well, why don’t you just tell us what your unanswerable point is?”
COUNSEL: “Ah, that is for your Lordships to discover.” |
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@childrenlawyer
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Comment
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Students can end FGM within a generation
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After the first conviction in the UK last week, Aneeta Prem reports of a strong desire among young people to end the barbaric practice
The mother convicted of female genital mutilation last week had pleaded her innocence, saying that the crime did not happen and that she knew nothing about it.
With this level of denial, how are we going to prevent this barbaric practice from happening on our shores, where young girls and even babies are at risk of being cut?
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Read the full story
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Quote of the day
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“If I hadn’t blown the whistle that company would still be ripping people off. They encourage you to give them information then hang you out to dry. This could potentially prevent others coming forward in the legal world.”
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Emily Scott, the 31-year-old former trainee who was recently struck off the solicitors’ roll despite having blown the whistle on misconduct at her firm; she was expressing her anger to [itals] The Sunday Telegraph over the regulator’s decision to prosecute even though the tribunal found that she had been bullied by senior lawyers at the Lincolnshire practice.
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Read the full story
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Blue Bag
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Vardag is flexible in motherhood
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Most lawyers quietly get on with their business in seclusion from the wider world. They occasionally emerge from their lairs to meet clients, but even that can be traumatic for some.
Ayesha Vardag (pictured) is not that type of lawyer. Indeed, even by the standards of those lawyers that do have something resembling a public profile, Vardag is in a different league. Which is presumably why the divorce specialist has told readers of The Sunday Times everything they could possibly want to know about her being pregnant with a fourth child at the age of 50.
Pregnancy may be exhausting but the interview is already paying dividends for the lawyer, as this extract from the article demonstrates: “Along with the likes of Baroness Shackleton and Lady Helen Ward, Vardag is one of a small troupe of divorce lawyers whom the global elite have on speed dial.”
Indeed, Vardag operates in a market where it does the opposite of harm when a Sunday newspaper publishes her hourly billing rate of £845. To paraphrase the film Withnail & I, “Nearly free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t …”
Vardag can also afford to be a champion of flexible working arrangements for mothers of young children. Itals] The Sunday Times revealed that a month after the initial interview was conducted her son, Orfeo, was born.
“Fortunately, because Vardags is my firm, I’m able to be flexible,” she tells the paper. “I can have a meeting here with the baby and I can just keep going. In the first few months I’d go out and feed him or get him brought in and feed him.”
At the time of the first round 23 years ago, with her eldest child, Jasper, law firms had trouble uttering the phrase flexible working. Vardag was a trainee with Linklaters, the City of London “magic circle” practice, where she was in the rat-race of 12-hour days. “I managed to finish my training contract on time,” she relates, adding with a note of pride: “I was the only trainee to have a baby and keep on going full-time in a City firm.”
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Closing Statement
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Long hour-hand of the law
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Mr Justice Wightman – the 19th-century High Court judge who was said to be one of the more amiable of his era – firmly believed that speeches in mitigation do not get any better the longer they last (writes James Morton).
Tiring of one long-winded performance before him, the judge told counsel: “You’ve said that before.”
“Have I, my Lord? I’m very sorry,” said the fawning counsel. “I quite forgot.”
“I forgive you,” said a charitable and understanding Wightman, before adding: “It was a very long time ago.”
James Morton is a former criminal law solicitor and now author
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