Foreword

Date01 January 2010
Author
Foreword
Mr Justice Bryan McMahon
Judge of the High Court of Ireland
A glance at the contents of recent volumes of the Hibernian Law Journal
shows articles on a wide range of topics ranging from articles dealing with
issues in international law, international trade law, comparative law, legal
history, environmental law, intellectual property, competition law, asylum
law as well as the more familiar areas of the constitutional protection of
children, insanity in the criminal law and the ubiquitous article on EU law.
Not so many years ago, many of these topics would not be found in
typical Law Faculty syllabuses and the varied nature of scholastic endeavour
evident in the recent volumes is testament to the changing nature of the
world we live in, where the increasing interdependence of nations and the
globalisation of our economies have seen the emergence of studies in, and
the regulation of, these interactions in a trans-national context. The recent
economic crisis in Greece emphasises that what were formerly local/national
problems can no longer be viewed as such and have serious implications not
only for other members of the European Union, but also for other world
economies, including the United States of America and world institutions
such as the International Monetary Fund. In this type of environment, it
should cause no surprise that international trade law, EU law, environ -
mental law, human rights law, migratory and asylum law should begin to
dominate the law journals. It does, however, continue to amaze that such a
switch of emphasis has happened in such a very short time.
The present volume of the Journal continues this pattern and has articles
on a similar range of topics, although traditionalists might be attracted to
the articles on the status of children in the Brehon law and Regulatin g
Religious Function: the Strange Case of Mass Cards.
In Tackling Bid Rigging in Public Pro curement – Ano ther Means of
Cutting Public Expendture During the Recession, Richard Kelly underlines
the fact that such anti-competitive behaviour costs the State (and the tax
payer) dearly (estimated at 4 billion annually) and that public enforcement
is not always effective and must be reformed so that private actions for
damages are facilitated and encouraged. Dr Anthony McGrath, in his article
The Provocation Predicament, examines the defence of provocation in the
law of criminal homicide. The traditional common law test of evaluating
the accused’s actions against the objective “reasonable man” standard has
been revisited in recent years, and the relationship with the accused’s
subjective mindset has not yet been definitively settled in this country. In this
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