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“Be like a potted plant and sit quietly in the corner”

16th May 2008

There’s a new look to our reporting in this section. So in my inaugural piece of commentary for the Legal News Roundup, I’ll start as I mean to go on: with a shock exposé from a far-flung clime. This week it’s Manila, where incensed correspondent Jet Hernandez is pushing the envelope of stunned disapproval in a disturbing piece in the Inquirer.

Reporting that a sizeable proportion of Filipino cinemagoers are flouting a law that dictates how audiences should behave when the national anthem is played, Hernandez lays out a four-point plan to help movie theatre authorities reduce the appalling trend. Including recommendations to display the law onscreen and put the police on standby to arrest violators, he finishes with the observation that “the singing of the Philippine National Anthem should provide the only sane moment that reminds a Filipino that he or she is still a Filipino, and everyone else in this country that he or she is still in the Philippines”. Could the piece be ironic? Certainly anything that puts one in mind of the classic lyric “remember you’re a Womble” is hard to take too seriously; but if serious and taken at face value, it’s difficult to accept Jet’s advice on “sane moments” as coming from one qualified to comment on sanity.

Thankfully our cousins in New Zealand have less to worry about and are spending the remaining few weeks of the current session of Parliament discussing the trifling matter of climate change. It’s suggested here that the government is in danger of running out of time to push through major pieces of legislation before the election – including its cornerstone climate change policy, the emissions trading-scheme. While in a related article, the deputy chair of a select committee on the issue claims that parliamentary consideration of the climate change Bill is so seriously flawed it is putting at risk one of the most important pieces of legislation in the past 20 years.

See Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Act 2006 c.19 for the UK equivalent.

Booting across the Pacific from Wellington, “academic freedom” is being advanced in four states of the Union, as reported in the education section of a Christian journal. The academic freedom in question? The right to teach intelligent design alongside – or even instead of – Darwinism. In a typical example of selective reasoning one supporter proclaims: “What these Bills seek to do is to restore Charles Darwin’s approach to teaching evolution – to teach it in a balanced, objective fashion.”

Lest I get stuck atop my scientific hobbyhorse I shall move onto a feel-good story, also from the States – specifically Utah – where a father and son have graduated together from law school. It’s touching. Read it.

But we’d be derelict in our duties if we allowed ourselves to finish on such a heartwarming note, for law is a serious pursuit and you’d do well to treat it as such. One Oklahoma attorney didn’t, as reported here, and will live to regret it. After telling another lawyer to “be like a potted plant and sit quietly in the corner” he’s been ordered to write an article on civility and professionalism for the Oklahoma Bar Journal. Given his choice of blue language, his sentence – or sentences – seems lenient in the extreme.

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