The Court of Justice has found, for the first time, that a Member State (Hungary) is in breach of Article 2 TEU (values of the EU) as a standalone provision. curia.europa.eu/site/upload/...

Belfast City Council: Challenge over proposed Irish language policy dismissed The new policy aims to promote the use of Irish in public life, including the usage of bilingual signage.

If this judgment represents a victory for unionism, as the TUV is claiming, I'm wondering how many more of these drubbings in Court as a result of bringing tendentious actions that unionism can take. #somuchwinning

share.google/B4nmjn7qHOjz...

McEntee urges EU action over Israel's death penalty law Ireland has joined Spain and Slovenia in formally calling for the EU to take action against Israel over a new law that would impose a mandatory death sentence on Palestinians accused of carrying out d...

Ireland has joined Spain and Slovenia in formally calling for the EU to take action against Israel over a new law that would impose a mandatory death sentence on Palestinians accused of carrying out deadly attacks on Israelis

It is very much a "view from on high" sort of a speech, with a few vibes about the "tik tok generation" that he is pretty much saying can give up on dreams of becoming a lawyer. But either in terms of legal practice or legal education, the outcomes he is selling are deeply problematic.

Sure, we will need to teach the ethics of AI use. But in terms of substantive content, spotting fakes involves humans having legal knowledge and being able to build legal argument. There is no shortcut away for teaching this core of legal skills. Being at the "sharp end" means saying that, loudly.

Worse, if Law Schools don't continue to train students to understand legal issues in depth, then they will not have the capacity to even do the "check AI is right" function he suggests will predominate. We're being sold cost cutting for law firms, with an airy wave about what will actually change:

But there are some real gaps in his analysis. More AI means fewer human lawyers working on crunchier issues. If human lawyers can't cut their teeth and hone their skills on the sorts of low level disputes Vos is now waving into an AI-driven space, they are not going to be capable for big cases:

Sir Geoffrey Vos has been at the forefront of boosting AI in law. In his speech yesterday to the ALT he was enthusing about its improvement to what litigants in person are presenting before county courts and selling that it means big changes for legal education:

www.judiciary.uk/speech-by-th...

Wales elections: what can we expect ahead of the polls? Wales will elect a new and expanded Senedd in three weeks time, there will be 96 new members rather than the current 60.

Want to understand the collapse of Labour in Wales?
And the Senedd elections more broadly?
Take 6 or 7 minutes to watch this report.
(#the implosion of the electorally most successful party in the democratic world.)
www.channel4.com/news/wales-e...

This the key point. If FCDO did overturn the vetting without telling anyone it was because it had already been announced. Which was a ridiculous thing to do.

Foreign Office’s top civil servant Olly Robbins to leave post over Mandelson vetting row Keir Starmer understood to have lost confidence in official over decision to override security vetting failure

No 10 are running out of people to throw in front of this scandal and there's little chance it stops here. It isn't plausible that the Perm Sec took such a decision without involving the Foreign Secretary. If it was plausible, then Lammy wasn't running the FCDO:

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Revealed: Mandelson failed vetting but Foreign Office overruled decision Guardian investigation uncovers decision by UK security officials to deny clearance before Mandelson took up role as US ambassador

This is why Members of Parliament were right to take the ultimate decision on non-disclosure of the Mandelson papers for “national security“ reasons out of the hands of the Prime Minister

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

A long excerpt from Hilary Benn's written statement on the ICRIR which admits that a review has flagged problems with its statutory arrangements, governance and culture. Even this summary vindicates criticisms of the current NI legacy body and calls into question why Benn has continued to push it:

"Write with fire, edit with ice (and come up for air)": *A bit scared to share*. SO many thanks to Mark Flear & Marie Selwood at the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly for inviting me to reflect on writing. It was unsettling and exposing. But also liberating... 1/5
nilq.qub.ac.uk/index.php/ni...

Legal advisers help migrants pose as gay to get asylum, undercover BBC investigation finds The BBC exposes a shadow industry charging migrants thousands of pounds to help them cheat the asylum system.

Disgusting reporting by BBC using a tiny number of cases to suggest widespread abuse of a system which routinely denies LGBTQIA+ individuals asylum and forces them back into environments of persecution. This article massively distorts the reality of the situation. 1/
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Legal advisers help migrants pose as gay to get asylum, undercover BBC investigation finds The BBC exposes a shadow industry charging migrants thousands of pounds to help them cheat the asylum system.

The ECHR doesn't oblige the UK to have a ramshackle & underfunded asylum system that is possible to exploit, the UK does that all by itself. It does oblige its states to provide protection to LGBT people facing very real threats of persecution, which gets missed here:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Well worth a read, on the structural factors in Ireland's governance and radical politics driving the fuel protests. Wheelchairs aren't as big as trucks and the left can learn nothing from this debacle doesn't cut it, and people need to hear a message that goes beyond enjoying FF/FG's discomfort:

Naturally @profmarkelliott.bsky.social is quite right. There is nothing new or unconstitutional about powers to track EU measures by secondary legislation (s. 2(2) of the European Communities Act 1972 did that while we were in the EU and ministers of all stripes used it all the time)

I really hope the Maurice Glasman on BBC radio banging on about the UK, an isolated middle-sized country, becoming a colony if it doesn't up defence spending meets the Maurice Glasman who backed the leaving the EU wants to leave the ECHR and asks him how the UK got so isolated.

Mythos and the cyber security risk facing all states AI is like the atomic bomb — once you invent the means to build one, you live in a different world

Very good from @stephenkb.bsky.social
- a big and largely overlooked externality of powerful AI is the cost everyone (states, businesses, ordinary households) will have to pay for more resilient cybersecurity. The land of milk and honey continues to recede!
www.ft.com/content/4334...

As a woman, I offer my sympathies to the Pope who is now being told hourly by very many random men what he actually means

In case it brightens up anyone's day, the sunset over West Cork is fair stunning...

& intent is usually so hard to prove in war crimes trials... seriously, this is horrendous.

That this is said aloud & many will cheer is probably the lowest pt this century.

ALL cooperation with US military must stop, or be implicated. He's said it out loud - he's about to commit a war crime.

Management consultants are ruining UK universities Relentless off-the-peg commercial rewiring has undermined British higher education

ICYMI earlier, I've written for the @financialtimes.com today about the boring, empty and unsuccessful 'strategies' being imposed on all our universities. If we go on like this, sooner or later we'll have 'reorganised' them all out of existence.
www.ft.com/content/5032...

With thanks to @alangreene.bsky.social, @laurcah.bsky.social and @donalcoffey.bsky.social for editing this special edition of the Jurist following up on last November's conference.

Coming out soon in the Irish Jurist, my musings on what NI experience tells us about displacing the constitutional conventions related to the executive:

Preprint version here:

"Circumscribing the Political Constitution: The Stormont Experience"

share.google/4ZYfDh2AKydK...

Now these are real scare quote marks. The Coleraine Chronicle delivers this Easter treat. They've only gone and cricified the English language...

Documents say asylum law centre was in “unprecedented crisis”. The Legal Aid Board tried to hide this with redactions. A spokesperson for the board said it redacted accounts that weren’t “evidence-based” and had not tried to “hide or trivialise the scale of any crisis”.

Documents say asylum law centre was in “unprecedented crisis”. The Legal Aid Board tried to hide it with redactions. A technical fail made it easy to reveal what sat behind the black rectangles. The board said it redacted accounts that weren’t “evidence-based”. www.dublininquirer.com/documents-sa...

Sex test used in IOC’s new transgender ban more likely to exclude from Olympics intersex women who were assigned female at birth Genetic testing is now required to participate in women’s events in the Olympics. But the new policy oversimplifies biological sex and risks discrimination against some female athletes.

“Sex testing has switched from genitals to genes to testosterone levels, and now back to genes. While the stated goal for these policies was to uncover males pretending to be female, they have never found any. Instead, they identified and excluded intersex women.”

Sex testing in sport harms women.

Really pleased to share my (open access!) article on immigration control in early modern England, feat. rights-bearing subjects, rightsless migrants, and experiments in immigration control