The Gazette 1991

april

1991

g a z e t t e

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

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

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