106 / 462
g a z e t t e
april
1991
A MEMOIR OF THE SOUTH-
WESTERN CIRCUIT
By Gerard A. Lee, S.C. Moytura
Press, Dublin. Paperback:
IRE4.99
Gerry Lee is almost fifty years at
the Irish Bar; he cut his teeth on the
South-Western Circuit which, of
course, is an offshoot of that most
arcane of all Irish legal institutions,
viz. the Munster Circuit.
We have been bereft of any legal
r emi n i scences since Mau r i ce
Healy's classic: " The Old Munster
Circuit". By comparison, it has to
be said that this is a rather slim
volume.
It was my high privilege and
pleasure to take part in t he
launching of this book at the King's
Inns last December and in the
course of it I pleaded w i th Gerry to
make sure that there was a fuller
account of those stirring times and
the great men who dominated the
circuit in the old days, such as
Maurice Danaher, William Binchy
and Billy Roche. Appropriately
enough the book is dedicated to
the gracious Maurice Danaher.
I am a constant fan of the Daniel
O'Connell correspondence and it is
interesting to note that aside from
the arrival of the motor car how
little the life of the journeyman
barrister had changed in the one
hund r ed years or so since
O'Connell's time to the 1940's.
Now, for good or ill, we live in the
age of the word processor and the
fax machine and, indeed, of the
regional airport. So, w i th the
litigation, the workman's compen-
sation code has disappeared; rent
restrictions and the correcting of
old titles are a thing of the past.
The first brief a barrister tended to
get was a payment out but as Mr.
Justice Barrington once pointed out
this most humble of all applications
led to one of the great cases, viz.
the
Sinn Fein Funds
case.
I would urge all practitioners to
buy a copy of this book; indeed,
they should buy a few copies of it
and keep it " in stock". As the years
go by the memoirs will be all the
more valuable.
The solicitors' profession can
claim credit for its inspiration be-
cause it was Eamonn Hall who
urged Gerry Lee to write this book
in the first instance; so there should
be no problem about a full comple-
ment of legal
g/asnost
in its
circulation.
In t he cou r se of his very
affectionate foreword to the book
Mr. Justice Lardner points out how
Gerry has brought to life the woods
and waters and hills of Kerry and
Clare and of his beloved Limerick;
the circuit towns with their graceful
stone courthouses and galleried
courtrooms; the antiquated yet
friendly hotels, the way of life and
travel of the circuit barristers.
I join w i th Mr. Justice Lardner in
hoping that Gerry may be moved to
write a further and more advent-
urous volume.
Hugh O'Flaherty
FROM DATA PROTECTION TO
KNOWLEDGE MACHINES: THE
STUDY
OF
LAW
AND
INFORMATICS
Edited by Professor P. Seipel.
[Kluwer, Law and Taxation Publish-
ers, Deventer, The Netherlands,
1990, xi + 283pp. paperback]
TRANSBORDER FLOW OF PER-
SONAL DATA WITHIN THE EC
[By A.C.M. Nugter, K l uwe r,
Deventer, 1990, xviii + 430pp. Dfl.
150,/US $85 paperback.]
If Karl Marx were alive today he
would probably have written his
magnum opus on
Die Information
and not
Das Kapital.
The current
technological revolution in informa-
t i on storage, p r ocess i ng and
retrieval is slowly affecting all
aspects of our economic, political,
legal and cultural lives.
Tehranian in his book
Techno-
logies of Power
(1990) argues, with
some poetic licence, that at least
four contending perspectives have
evolved in relation to the impact of
information technologies. The
technophiies
t end to be t he
optimists who believe that the
present technological revolution in
information storage, processing
and retrieval has already in-
augu r a t ed a " po s t - i ndu s t r i a l,
information society" w i th higher
productivity and plenty at the world
centres that will eventually trickle
down to the peripheries. The
technophobes
are, by contrast,
rather pessimistic about such
promises of widespread product-
ivity and plenty. They point to the
threats that increasing robotisation
and computer-assisted design and
manufacturing (CAD—CAM) hold
for rising structural unemployment;
to t he perils t hat t he new
da t abases pose for po l i t i cal
surveillance and individual privacy;
to the dangers that homogenisation
of culture by media monopolies
present for cultural antonomy and
diversity.
The
technoneutrals
typically
tend to be the consultants, who
have few theoretical pretensions
and considerable interest at stake
not to alientate their clients. The
technostructuraiists
include some
reluctant optimists and pessimists
who argue that technologies are by
themselves neither good, nor bad
nor neutral. None of us must ever
forget that the tools of technology
do not operate in a vacuum; the
tools of technology are man-made
and man-used.
From Data Protection to Know-
ledge Machines
is t he f i f t h
publication in the computer/law
series from Kluwer. The inter-
national board of editors includes
Dr. Robert Clark, lecturer in law,
University College Dublin.
From
Data Protection
to
Knowledge
Machines
contains articles and
papers by international experts in
relation to privacy protection and
access to information. The first
article in this collection deals w i th
data protection and its author is
Professor Knut Selmer of the Oslo
University. His contribution deals
w i th a number of problems which
are met by data i nspec t i on
authorities both in his own country
88