Pod Academy attended the talk with a cunningly disguised tape-recorder and and they have now uploaded the talk on to their website. You can listen to what we said here.
Pod Academy offers downloadable podcasts, featuring academics and professionals, talking about research and issues of the day. It’s worth checking out.
Where once was Blockbuster video is now a hip new coffee shop. The shelves where we would hover and scrutinise film titles, seeking an evening’s entertainment, have been replaced with chandaliers and easy chairs. But a rather good flat white, albeit in a glass rather than a cup.
And so on to Arthouse – a new cinema! In Crouch End! In the old Salvation Army Hall!
It’s been adapted in an inviting fashion, concrete floors, wooden mismatched tables and chairs with a bar selling coffee and alcohol, and another small sitting area up some wooden stairs. And two cinema screens. All looking very good and eminently supportable.
And so we booked to see The Double. Jesse Eisenberg, James Fox, Mia Wasikowska, Chris O’Dowd, based on a Dostoesvsky story – it was so promising. Unfortunately, it was not as good as it should have been. It was not a story I was ever going to enjoy, a pathetic man being trodden down by his confident doppelganger, but it was irritating, the silences, the dark depressing set and the predictability of it all. However, the cinema was full, and there were trailers for some very good looking films. A positive development.
Next time – artistic creation. An attempt at cake making. Should this be the cover of A Sense of Occasion?
Through the wind and the rain and on the wrong bus I battled my way to the Ebsworth Memorial Lecture in the Great Hall of Middle Temple. How long is it since I slipped along the cobbled pathway that is Middle Temple Lane? How long since I actually went into the splendour of the Great Hall? It is where I ate my dinners, where I was called to the Bar, and where I have perhaps twice had lunch since then.
The speaker was a judge from the American Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer, talking about Judicial Independence. In fact his lecture was more about the Rule of Law. Even if you don’t agree with a particular part of it, he talked of the words that describe a society governed by the rule of law – humane, decent, civilised, and what the alternative is – random, incoherent, effectively chaos. He did talk about the impossibility of reconciling an elected judiciary with the notion of judicial independence. He talked about the major decisions which are taken by the Supreme Court, which are often quite technical, not to say apparently boring, but which can affect people’s daily lives and which are routinely ignored by the press, but the moment the word abortion, for example, is mentioned, the Supreme Court is all over the news. He touched on the case of Bush v Gore, which decided the result of the 2000 presidential election, by majority of 5-4. He mourned the cuts in public funding of schools which mean that Civics lessons, learning about government and the Consitution, are removed from the Curriculum so that people aren’t being taught what law is.
But what most interested me in what he said was when he talked about the 1958 Supreme Court case of Cooper v Aaron. The issue was the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. Although it had been decreed by the school district that the school would be desegregated, when the black children turned up to attend school in 1957, they were turned away. The Supreme Court found that the problem lay with the view of the State government which opposed desegregation. The decision of the Supreme Court was unusually unanimous and signed by all 9 members of the Court and was to the effect that states were bound by the Court’s decisions and had to enforce them even if the states disagreed with them. And Justice Breyer touched on the human and public side of that debate, involving two young women at the time, one black, one white, Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan, and how the 4 September 1957 became a day that neither of them would ever forget. He mentioned a book that has been written about their stories. Here is the trailer.
