Maintenance and champerty

by John Q on August 17, 2012

Those are the marvellous names for the old common law offences/torts involved in persuading others to engage in a lawsuit for your own benefit (feel free to state more precisely, IANAL).  They’ve mostly been abolished now, which is probably a good thing in terms of alllowing class actions and similar, and they’ve never applied (AFAIK) in international law.

Nevertheless, a reminder of the reason such laws existed has come with the announcement of a WTO complaint by Ukraine against Australia’s plain packaging laws for cigarettes.

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The generation game

by John Q on August 17, 2012

The issue of generational politics came up in the discussion of my grandfather clause post, so I thought I would republish what I immodestly regard as the definitive refutation of the entire genre of “generation game” writing. I wrote it in 2000, so it’s now the better part of a generation old, but as far as I can see, nothing I’ve written needs to be changed[1]. But, doubtless, the CT commentary team will find much that needs to be changed, or should never have been written, so have at it.

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