Monday, September 08, 2008

Academic Mentions

With my penchant for word play on ambiguous meanings (blame it on law school), here's a quick update for the one person who might still be reading this blog.

1. This blog has been mentioned in the following academic paper, "Is the Singapore Socio-Political Blogosphere a Hambermasian Public Sphere?". But unfortunately (or fortunately), because I did not comment on the particular issue that author was concerned about, all I got was a mention on the list of 51 blogs he used.

2. I'm in the midst of my Practical Legal Course (PLC) right now, which is one of the two requirements before I get called to the bar. Or as I am more fond of putting it, get inducted into the world of soulsuckers. The other part involves pupilage i.e. pupiling with a pupil-master. So I currently occupy the position of lackey. Come next May, I will get promoted to minion. And with time, I will rise to the august position of Minion of Darkness. To preempt any questions, I'm doing my pupilage at "a small sole proprietor". For those who are aware of where I'm pupiling, yes I am aware that it is highly misleading, but that's how I describe it right now.

3. My Boss has very graciously allowed me to be co-author for a paper I was assisting him on. So I now have a publication to "my" name. (I'm well aware that I'm riding on his coat-tails but I did quite some work on the paper. And technically I have published some years back but that was honestly shite. I blame it on my youth.).

I'm not entirely certain how long I'll keep up blogging. I can honestly say that this is the first time I have been free since graduation/starting work. And the stupidity in the press seems to have died down somewhat so there's not much material to get riled up about and fisk.

I might be retooling this blog to focus on legal journalism instead. I have personally found that the quality of legal reporting in the local press has ranged from excellent (BT and ST's coverage of the legal issues in en-bloc sales are pretty good) to abysmal (totally messing up the Jonathan Lock case reporting. I mean if a whole bunch of lawyers and law students cannot understand your article despite specialist knowledge, something is seriously wrong. And they also messed up reporting of the Philippines Marcos bank account case. Admittedly that was really complicated).

It's not apparent to the public but our Court of Appeal has made some rather big shifts in the law but it has been piecemeal. I appreciate that we're not as politicised as the US Supreme Court BUT that's not to say that the tenor of the decisions has remained still since Chan CJ took over and Phang JA got allevated to the Court of Appeal. It's a very frighteningly intellectual and brilliant bench (and maybe somewhat academic but.......yeah....) now, and it shows in their decisions.

But it's really all in the pipelines right now. There's a lull in the course which will not last. And work always beckons round the corner.

Peace

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