All legal posts: February 2008 Archives

At Opinio Juris Roger Alford asks whether recognition of leap year constitutes customary international law, having "been in practice since the 16th century ... general, consistent and uninterrupted across the decades." He goes on to note, "No state claims a right to object to the practice. And yet no treaty governs the question."

Meanwhile, in more pedestrian legal matters, I overheard a lawyer declare, "Leap year's great. An extra day to get in your billable hours."

I wonder, though, if there were firms out there that added extra hours to the yearly requirement because there was the extra day...

Walter Olson at Point of Law links to an article about someone trying to sue her employer for demoting her after she blew the whistle on their conduct while she was working for them in France. The news from the case is that a US judge decided that, despite the various nations implicated in the matter (Bermudan company, American subsidiary, British employee, French workplace), American whistleblowing law applies to the case and gives her a cause of action to pursue in American courts.

I don't have enough information to fully analyze the issue, but I wanted to raise a possible related factor not mentioned in the Law.com article. A few weeks ago I attended a CLE event sponsored by the Orrick law firm that discussed the issues faced by American companies when doing business in Europe. At one point the panelists brought up the issue of whistleblowing as an instance when policies that may work for a company's offices in the United States might not also work for its foreign ones. In the US securities regulations require American companies to establish policies allowing employees to report malfeasant corporate conduct without fear of retribution in effort to protect the shareholding public.

But no matter how great the policy works for its American offices, it can't just be automatically imposed upon its foreign ones. The rules and cultural norms in these other places may in fact prohibit it. Like in France, where whistleblowing is poorly regarded, and possibly even illegal. Whistleblowing is regarded as snitching, contrary to the spirit of worker solidarity, and harkens back to unpleasant historical memories of collaborations with the Vichy government and the like.

Thus, given the particular nations involved in this case of O'Mahony v. Accenture, I suspect there may be more going on here than necessarily meets the American eye.

I mentioned on the "Turning Cathy into a Lawyer" blog how much I enjoyed Stephen Fry's (relatively) new TV series, Kingdom, and how PBS really needed to bring it over to America. Happily, they have, and one of my local stations, KTEH, has been showing it on Monday nights. So far they are about halfway through the first season of six shows, and it is well worth tuning in. Or, if you can't, or if you'd like to catch up on the epidodes you've missed, fortunately there's the Internet to help you out...

The show centers around Peter Kingdom, a small-town solicitor in Norfolk, England. Stephen Fry plays him as an eminently wise and patient jack-of-all-trades, exactly the kind of person you'd want your local lawyer to be. And yet, it's believable, as along the way we see that Peter is partly the man he was born to be by nature, and partly the man long experience at the job has taught him to be. He's contrasted by his young "articles clark," who, while obviously a good soul, is still learning, as Peter's apprentice, how to distill his youthful idealism into patient practice.

While I think a lay person would definitely enjoy this show, what with it being so well-crafted in every respect, e.g., with sympathetic characters, engaging story lines, inviting scenery, warmth, humor, etc., the fascination for me is in how it portrays the law. As an American lawyer I obviously don't know to what extent the show might be over-fictionalizing the practice of English law, but the detail in the scripts suggests that at least some effort has gone into not completely glossing over it. Indeed, many aspects of the show (e.g., plots, theme, character development, etc.) are heavily dependent on Peter Kingdom actually being a practicing lawyer. It's not just an excuse to give him something to do.