The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom began hearings on December 5, 2016 on an appeal from a High Court judgment
that only Parliament could trigger Brexit.
We see "no legal exit" from the High Court's argumentation and judgment.
The BBC News earlier already reported on the judicial process to come at The 11 Supreme Court judges who could rule on UK's Brexit appeal
[hat tip to CaryGEE] and more recently reported on the court's Brexit hearings under the misleading headline: Supreme Court Brexit case: 'No need' for MPs to get final say.
Well, the case is by no means decided yet and "need" has nothing to do with it. The correct headline should have been: Supreme Court Brexit case: Does UK constitutional law require Parliament to have the final say?
The Brexit case puts squarely to the test the system of checks and balances that define the separation of powers among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.
What the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom is now considering is an appeal from a High Court judgment
of 3 November 2016 [The High Court of Justice, Queen's Bench Division, Divisional Court, Neutral Citation Number: [2016] EWHC 2768 (Admin), Case No: CO/3809/2016 and CO/3281/2016]
which found that rights conferred by Parliament in 1972 were likely to be affected by Brexit and that only Parliament therefore had the authority to act on the matter of a UK withdrawal from the European Union.
The High Court judgment reads
as follows (as excerpted by LawPundit)
:
" (7)
Our decision on the legal question
[larger text as emphasis added by Law Pundit]
...
[Our] view is reinforced by reference to two constitutional principles.
(c)
The principle that the Crown
[LawPundit: "Crown" here means the executive branch of government]
cannot use its prerogative powers to alter domestic law
[block emphasis added by Law Pundit]
First, the powerful constitutional principle that the Crown has no power to alter the law of the land by use of its prerogative powers is the product of an especially strong constitutional tradition in the United Kingdom.... It evolved through the long struggle ... to assert parliamentary sovereignty and constrain the Crown’s prerogative powers.... As Lord Browne-Wilkinson put it in
R v Secretary of State for the Home Department, ex p. Fire Brigades Union
[1995] 2 AC 513 at 552E:
"It is for Parliament, not the executive, to repeal legislation. The constitutional history of this country is the history of the prerogative powers of the Crown being made subject to the overriding powers of the democratically elected legislature as the sovereign body."
...
Parliament having taken the major step of switching on the direct effect of EU law in the national legal systems by passing the ECA 1972 as primary legislation, it is not plausible to suppose that it intended that the Crown should be able by its own unilateral action under its prerogative powers to switch it off again.
Moreover, the status of the ECA 1972 as a constitutional statute is such that Parliament is taken to have made it exempt from the operation of the usual doctrine of implied repeal by enactment of later inconsistent legislation: see Thoburn v Sunderland City Council
, at [60]-[64], and section 2(4) of the ECA 1972. It can only be repealed in any respect if Parliament makes it especially clear in the later repealing legislation that this is what it wishes to do. Since in enacting the ECA 1972 as a statute of major constitutional importance Parliament has indicated that it should be exempt from casual implied repeal by Parliament itself, still less can it be thought to be likely that Parliament nonetheless intended that its legal effects could be removed by the Crown through the use of its prerogative powers.
(d)
The Crown’s prerogative power operates only on the international plane
[block emphasis added by Law Pundit]
The second principle is the well settled limitation on the constitutional understanding that the conduct of international relations is a matter for the Crown in the exercise of its prerogative powers.... It is precisely because the exercise of the Crown’s prerogative powers in the conduct of international relations has no effect in domestic law that the courts accept that this is a field of action left to the Crown and recognise the strength of the understanding that it is not readily to be inferred that Parliament intended to interfere with it. But the justification for a presumption of non-interference with the Crown’s prerogative in the conduct of international affairs is substantially undermined in a case such as this, where the Secretary of State is maintaining that he can through the exercise of the Crown’s prerogative bring about major changes in domestic law.
For this reason, it is our view that the decision in ex p. Rees-Mogg
, on which the Secretary of State sought to place considerable weight, does not provide guidance in the present case....
In the very different context of the present case, the question is whether the Crown has power under its prerogative to withdraw
from the relevant EU Treaties where such withdrawal will, on the Secretary of State’s argument, have a major effect on the content of domestic law. It is clear that the court in ex p Rees Mogg
did not touch on that question.
(e) Our conclusion as to Parliament’s intention
[block emphasis added by Law Pundit]
Interpreting the ECA 1972 in the light of the constitutional background referred to above, we consider that it is clear that Parliament intended to legislate by that Act so as to introduce EU law into domestic law (and to create the category (ii) rights) in such a way that this could not be undone by exercise of Crown prerogative power. With the enactment of the ECA 1972, the Crown has no prerogative power to effect a withdrawal from the Community Treaties on whose continued existence the EU law rights introduced into domestic law depend (rights in categories (i) and (iii)) and on whose continued existence the wider rights of British citizens in category (ii) also depend. The Crown therefore has no prerogative power to effect a withdrawal from the relevant Treaties by giving notice under Article 50 of the TEU.
"
Is there a "legal exit" for "Brexit" other than through Parliament?
We think not.
In any case, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom will decide.
For Brexit supporters -- who may rightly worry that the court will determine that only Parliament can "trigger" Brexit -- they should note that it will be a decision not made by the European Union or by any outsiders, but rather very much by one of its own three principal institutions of constitutional democratic government. Take a look again at "home-based" Eleven Supreme Court Justices
.
That is what checks and balances and the separation of powers is all about.
Ultimately, of course, the PEOPLE decide, but the legal processes in place that are required to be followed, must be followed.
A referendum can be an important indicator of the wishes of the people, but it has no force of law, and, indeed, is a only a momentary indicator of what people are thinking at the time of that referendum.
Given the many negative things that have happened to UK fortunes in the interim, especially on the financial side, it is indeed even likely that yet another referendum on the same question would currently probably give a different end result -- even if the vote were close.
There is good reason why democracy is based on representative
government, i.e. people who are elected to serve for extended periods of time, rather than on having a direct popular vote on every governmental question. Representative government provides continuity of policy. Direct popular voting on every governmental question would be ephemeral and lead to boundless chaos.
Monday, December 19, 2016
Saturday, December 17, 2016
Newspapers, News Media and Biased Reporting : How Can We Get the Real Facts?
What's the most neutral news/media outlet on earth
?
Of course, there are none. All news is sifted and chosen for a story (or not) ....
Too often, what readers "want" to read prevails over what should be read.
One useful way to judge news stories that appear these days in mainstream media sources is to ask:
" Is this an overblown balloon to sell newspapers? "
Over the years, we have developed a habit of reading most mainstream news, science reports and similar publications with a grain of salt. What is touted as important news can often be nothing more than a whistle against the wind.
Mainstream media today often no longer deliver "the news that is fit to print" but rather they propagate their own brand of biased " slants " on the news, a completely different animal than neutral fact delivery.
One sees this currently in news reporting about U.S. President Elect Donald Trump, where often politically biased futuristic crystal ball tea-leaf reading prevails among many journalists, who know no more than anyone else about what Trump's Presidency will actually bring.
Contemporary news media do not just report that e.g. "this happened"; rather, mostly they report on what happened that "they think is important", and then "their take on that happening" and, usually prematurely, "here is what it means" -- conclusions, which, by later hindsight, can be totally false.
That results in widespread news unreliability and event vacuousness. The news media too often act like hired advocates for the political, economic, legal and social causes that they personally support, while they conversely oppose "news" that does not fit into their particular way of looking at the world. That "politically correct" approach to news quickly becomes "boring" and suspect to this observer. Tea-leaf reading in the news can leave the reader to emerge not knowing more than he or she did before, and one can even be badly misled.
In any case, since we are political centrists interested in unbiased presentations, the proliferation of biased, slanted news makes getting the "real facts" difficult.
Our own solution is to read as many different newspapers, news media reports and op-eds as possible about any subject that interests us, also from different countries and from varied points of view, in the hope that a broad selection of sources will provide a clearer picture of actual events. Indeed, it is then always amazing to see how greatly the media presentations of so-called "facts" can vary depending on the source, even among English-language media sources. We do not even go into the many foreign-language newspapers, where even greater variety of reporting will be found.
Newspapers
Newspapers are still a big deal but are losing ground to newer media.
See Journalism.org .
In terms of total coverage, Google News Aggregator is the biggest:
Google News Aggregator (World) .
Newspapers have made it online too. For example, Amazon even features:
Newspapers on Kindle .
See a recent list of the Top 200 Newspapers in the World .
See a List of Newspapers in the United States
including the Top 25 Newspapers in the USA by Weekday Circulation
Some of the World's English-Language Newspapers & Media
(Some newspapers removed due to their inexcusable EU Privacy Protection Boycott)
Wall Street Journal (USA)
Bloomberg (USA)
The Hill (USA)
Fox News (USA)
New York Times (USA)
NPR (USA)
Huffington Post (USA)
Pew Research (USA)
Washington Post (USA)
Los Angeles Times (USA)
Forbes (USA)
The Times (United Kingdom)
BBC News (United Kingdom)
The Guardian (United Kingdom)
The Telegraph (United Kingdom)
The Daily Mail (United Kingdom)
The Independent (United Kingdom)
Financial Times (United Kingdom)
Russia Today at RT.com (Russia)
The Korea Herald (South Korea)
Deutsche Welle (Germany)
Spiegel Online International (Germany)
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung FAZ (Germany)
Die Zeit (Germany)
The Asahi Shimbun (Shimbun= News) (Japan)
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
China Daily (China)
People's Daily (China)
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
LeMonde diplomatique (France)
The Times of India (India)
The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Sunday Times (South Africa)
Of course, there are none. All news is sifted and chosen for a story (or not) ....
Too often, what readers "want" to read prevails over what should be read.
One useful way to judge news stories that appear these days in mainstream media sources is to ask:
" Is this an overblown balloon to sell newspapers? "
Over the years, we have developed a habit of reading most mainstream news, science reports and similar publications with a grain of salt. What is touted as important news can often be nothing more than a whistle against the wind.
Mainstream media today often no longer deliver "the news that is fit to print" but rather they propagate their own brand of biased " slants " on the news, a completely different animal than neutral fact delivery.
One sees this currently in news reporting about U.S. President Elect Donald Trump, where often politically biased futuristic crystal ball tea-leaf reading prevails among many journalists, who know no more than anyone else about what Trump's Presidency will actually bring.
Contemporary news media do not just report that e.g. "this happened"; rather, mostly they report on what happened that "they think is important", and then "their take on that happening" and, usually prematurely, "here is what it means" -- conclusions, which, by later hindsight, can be totally false.
That results in widespread news unreliability and event vacuousness. The news media too often act like hired advocates for the political, economic, legal and social causes that they personally support, while they conversely oppose "news" that does not fit into their particular way of looking at the world. That "politically correct" approach to news quickly becomes "boring" and suspect to this observer. Tea-leaf reading in the news can leave the reader to emerge not knowing more than he or she did before, and one can even be badly misled.
In any case, since we are political centrists interested in unbiased presentations, the proliferation of biased, slanted news makes getting the "real facts" difficult.
Our own solution is to read as many different newspapers, news media reports and op-eds as possible about any subject that interests us, also from different countries and from varied points of view, in the hope that a broad selection of sources will provide a clearer picture of actual events. Indeed, it is then always amazing to see how greatly the media presentations of so-called "facts" can vary depending on the source, even among English-language media sources. We do not even go into the many foreign-language newspapers, where even greater variety of reporting will be found.
Newspapers
Newspapers are still a big deal but are losing ground to newer media.
See Journalism.org .
In terms of total coverage, Google News Aggregator is the biggest:
Google News Aggregator (World) .
Newspapers have made it online too. For example, Amazon even features:
Newspapers on Kindle .
See a recent list of the Top 200 Newspapers in the World .
See a List of Newspapers in the United States
including the Top 25 Newspapers in the USA by Weekday Circulation
Some of the World's English-Language Newspapers & Media
(Some newspapers removed due to their inexcusable EU Privacy Protection Boycott)
Wall Street Journal (USA)
Bloomberg (USA)
The Hill (USA)
Fox News (USA)
New York Times (USA)
NPR (USA)
Huffington Post (USA)
Pew Research (USA)
Washington Post (USA)
Los Angeles Times (USA)
Forbes (USA)
The Times (United Kingdom)
BBC News (United Kingdom)
The Guardian (United Kingdom)
The Telegraph (United Kingdom)
The Daily Mail (United Kingdom)
The Independent (United Kingdom)
Financial Times (United Kingdom)
Russia Today at RT.com (Russia)
The Korea Herald (South Korea)
Deutsche Welle (Germany)
Spiegel Online International (Germany)
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung FAZ (Germany)
Die Zeit (Germany)
The Asahi Shimbun (Shimbun= News) (Japan)
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
China Daily (China)
People's Daily (China)
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
LeMonde diplomatique (France)
The Times of India (India)
The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Sunday Times (South Africa)
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Nature's CRISPR and the Absurdities of Modern Patents and Patent Law
What the CRISPR Patent Dispute is All About
is discussed by Jacob S. Sherkow at the Guest Blog at the Scientific American. Take a look there at some of the absurd and shameful issues that dismal patent granting have generated.
And the answer, in our opinion ... is ... that none of the purported "inventions" in the CRISPR disputes are or should be patentable inventions, because nothing new has been invented per se.
CRISPR means "Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats" and they are there by NATURE, not by man-made creation.
As written at Gizmodo by Sarah Zhang in
Everything You Need to Know About CRISPR, the New Tool that Edits DNA :
"CRISPR is far better than older techniques for gene splicing and editing. And you know what? Scientists didn’t invent it."
That's right, it is a NATURAL gene mechanism, a product of nature that scientists are merely exploiting, that is all.
Patentable in any way, shape or form?
NO, not in our book.
Just read that whole Gizmodo article and now ask why anyone should be able to get any kind of patents on CRISPR, which scientists are EXPLOITING, not inventing.
Just imagine patents on the way you could cut cloth or anything else with scissors. Or imagine your local butcher being limited by patents on how to cut meat. Or ponder patents for the way in which loggers would be allowed to cut trees. That is the game being played in the biological sciences.
The whole CRISPR dispute is ridiculous and anathema to the human spirit ... materially greedy people and institutions battle increasingly over who gets the massive monies that very wrongly granted patent monopolies generate -- not just on splicing and editing genomes, but also on products with rounded corners, etc.
Patents these days are not a matter of rewarding inventors fairly, but rather mean primarily the grant of extensive monopolies to persons or institutions, whereby those patents then create vast accumulations of wealth far beyond the benefits that any development they made actually provides to society.
Indeed, almost all of these purported "inventions" are nothing more than obvious steps taken on the basis of the constantly expanding state of the art, especially in the biological sciences. OBVIOUS STEPS.
That is why often multiple people often perceive next step developments at nearly the same time, because they are researching in obvious directions, directions that are obvious given the state of the art.
And what is obvious is not patentable.
And the answer, in our opinion ... is ... that none of the purported "inventions" in the CRISPR disputes are or should be patentable inventions, because nothing new has been invented per se.
CRISPR means "Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats" and they are there by NATURE, not by man-made creation.
As written at Gizmodo by Sarah Zhang in
Everything You Need to Know About CRISPR, the New Tool that Edits DNA :
"CRISPR is far better than older techniques for gene splicing and editing. And you know what? Scientists didn’t invent it."
That's right, it is a NATURAL gene mechanism, a product of nature that scientists are merely exploiting, that is all.
Patentable in any way, shape or form?
NO, not in our book.
Just read that whole Gizmodo article and now ask why anyone should be able to get any kind of patents on CRISPR, which scientists are EXPLOITING, not inventing.
Just imagine patents on the way you could cut cloth or anything else with scissors. Or imagine your local butcher being limited by patents on how to cut meat. Or ponder patents for the way in which loggers would be allowed to cut trees. That is the game being played in the biological sciences.
The whole CRISPR dispute is ridiculous and anathema to the human spirit ... materially greedy people and institutions battle increasingly over who gets the massive monies that very wrongly granted patent monopolies generate -- not just on splicing and editing genomes, but also on products with rounded corners, etc.
Patents these days are not a matter of rewarding inventors fairly, but rather mean primarily the grant of extensive monopolies to persons or institutions, whereby those patents then create vast accumulations of wealth far beyond the benefits that any development they made actually provides to society.
Indeed, almost all of these purported "inventions" are nothing more than obvious steps taken on the basis of the constantly expanding state of the art, especially in the biological sciences. OBVIOUS STEPS.
That is why often multiple people often perceive next step developments at nearly the same time, because they are researching in obvious directions, directions that are obvious given the state of the art.
And what is obvious is not patentable.
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