Gwynedd Parry at the University of Swansea has written up his 2006 paper on minority languages and jury service (which I missed in its original form, at the International Academy of Lingustic Law’s conference, being in another room at the time!). It’s published in the latest edition (June 2007, v 27 no 2) of Legal Studies, the house journal of the Society of Legal Scholars, which arrived in these parts earlier this week. The article is also available in HTML and PDF, but behind a paywall (most academic users should be able to see the pages if proxy settings are correct and your institution has subscribed, though).

Parry is arguing from a ‘citizenship’ point of view, rather than focusing on the ‘lingustic rights of the defendant’, and I think that is a wise choice. Outlining the legislative and constitutional backgrounds to both jury service and language rights in Ireland and Wales (and Canada for comparative purposes), he concludes that: “as far as jury service is concerned, speakers of Scottish Gaelic and Welsh are not ‘citizens“. With regard to Irish, he’s highly critical of the Mac Cárthaigh decision (where an applicant failed in his bid to secure an Irish-speaking jury). Continuing through an analysis of European and international law (primarily soft law and unimplemented treaties, mind you), he also addresses the problems that an attempt to provide for bilingual juries would face: including the challenge they would pose to ‘random selection’ principles. He does us the service of even setting out a draft amendment to the relevant provisions of the Juries Act, and concludes by returning to the citizenship point:

Jury service is an important obligation of citizenship. It is also a privilege of citizenship. Historically, ‘villeins and aliens’ and the politically disenfranchised were excluded from it. In present times, the rules on jury service eligibility in Wales and Ireland betray the fact that, despite the legislative reforms of recent years, Irish and Welsh-speakers continue to be treated as inferior citizens. Their citizenship is incomplete, because, as Irish and Welsh-speakers, they are disqualified from jury service. As this paper has sought to demonstrate, rectifying that injustice will not fundamentally undermine the jury as an institution, but will act as further affirmation of the full citizenship of the speakers of these ancient languages, and their right, as speakers of these languages, to participate in one of the public responsibilities of that status.

Andrew Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur (mentioned in passing in these parts earlier this month, receives Lawrence Lessig’s strict scrutiny over here. Lessig concludes that the errors and assumptions in Keen’s book are in fact self-parody (I haven’t read the book yet, so I’m reserving comment for now!), and then sets out (in a detailed post, copied to a - yes - wiki entitled The Keen Reader) some particular examples. A fun one is Keen saying that “every defunct record label and round of newspaper downsizing are a consequence of “free” user-generated Internet content—from Craigslist’s free advertising, to free music videos, to free encyclopedias, to free weblogs.” I hope (for his sake) that there is one hell of a footnote to that; otherwise, it’s just like shooting fish in a barrel. I’ve been looking forward to reading Keen’s book, and now that there is a good old-fashioned factcheck and spat breaking out (the use of the wiki format for it must annoy Keen to no end), it’s certainly a must-read.

A sort of manifesto from Ben Myers at the Guardian, praising the joy of secondhand book shops. (Sadly, it took less than 90 minutes for someone to pop up and claim that writers are being ’screwed’ by secondhand shops, as ‘they get nothing’. Oh how the publishers and the agents would love to get their thirty pieces of silver).

On the end of Greene’s (see here), Ruth (rightly) wonders why there wasn’t more of a fuss. The island of writers? Please.

The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, an online information source, puts together a great series of book reviews. I use it a lot, so it’s worth sharing. Reviews, reviews and more reviews here. I’m going to be reviewing Charles Acland’s collection of essays (by various authors) on Residual Media, in the near future.

Not for Safari. Drat.

More here.