Blawg Review

It's not just a blog carnival; it's the law! ~ a fool in the forest

It's Up Down Under

Blawg Review #266 is hosted this week by Peter Black on his Freedom to Differ blog from beautiful Brisbane, Australia. Brisbane is on the left coast of Australia, as seen on the map down under.


Some might wonder what the world is coming to when a new generation on the worldwide web thinks today is Quit Facebook Day when it's Memorial Day, a day to remember those in the military who died in wars. In Australia that would be Remembrance Day, which is on Veterans Day. Confused, mate? Welcome to Australia.

Towel Day Meetup


How much is that doggie in the window? Don't ask. He's cute though; an especially thoughtful touch in a hotel room on Towel Day. Just one of the many nice things about our visit to Chicago for Inside Counsel's SuperConference.

With interest in this year's SuperConference tweaked in anticipation of Scott Greenfield's presentation on "white collar crime for lawyers" a great mix of law bloggers got together for rare face-to-face meetup.

Chicago's own Windypundit showed up with a professional camera, so there's no denying it if you were there.

A Trademark Blogger's Dream


My good friend Marty went to Boston and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Scheduled to host Blawg Review #265 on The Trademark Blog, which recently marked its 8th anniversary, Marty Schwimmer has taken the show on the road to the INTA Annual Meeting in Boston.

Joining us there will be previous Blawg Review hosts Jeremy Phillips and Marc Randazza and many other leading bloggers who have hosted Blawg Review. As part of the fun at INTA this year, Marty Schwimmer, Ron Coleman, Pam Chestek and John Welch will host Meet the Bloggers VI tonight, May 24th at 8 p.m. at Lucky's Lounge in Boston.

Lucky, we're lucky Professor Kingsfield isn't in Boston anymore. This might go down in the history of Blawg Review as the "Lost" edition.

Irish Famine Blawg Review


Custom House Quays, Dublin. Painfully thin sculptural figures, by artist Rowan Gillespie, stand as if walking towards the emigration ships on the Dublin Quayside.


To commemorate National Famine Memorial Day, Rossa McMahon hosts Blawg Review #264.

The Great Famine of Ireland is memorialized in many locations throughout Ireland, especially in those regions that suffered the greatest losses, and also in cities overseas with large populations descended from Irish immigrants.

The history of the Irish Famine has been re-examined in recent years by historians like Jim Donnelly, who writes about the catastrophe in no uncertain terms.
Altogether, about a million people in Ireland are reliably estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease between 1846 and 1851, and some two million emigrated in a period of a little more than a decade (1845-55). Comparison with other modern and contemporary famines establishes beyond any doubt that the Irish famine of the late 1840s, which killed nearly one-eighth of the entire population, was proportionally much more destructive of human life than the vast majority of famines in modern times.
Christine Kinealy, in The Great Irish Potato Famine, and: Famine, Land and Culture in Ireland, credits Donnelly's work and its importance.
Ireland's Great Hunger was a watershed not only in the development of Ireland, but also in the development of the United States. Yet, until the mid-1990s, it was ignored, marginalized, or disregarded by Irish historians. The 150th anniversary produced an unprecedented and unexpected outpouring of interest that extended far beyond the reach of professional historians. Consequently, scholars have recently employed new methodological and interdisciplinary approaches to increase the understanding of this pivotal event. Students of Ireland's Great Famine owe a debt to James Donnelly. His early research on the Famine helped to break an academic silence and to give the tragedy its rightful place in Irish history. In 1989 he contributed a set of chapters to the solid (but not widely read) A New History of Ireland. In an article published in History Ireland in 1993, Donnelly identified the gap between academic and popular perceptions of the Famine. He also took revisionist historians to task for not having confronted the tragedy "honestly and squarely"...
For many Irish, it was a difficult choice: Death or Canada.
For Torontonians, the influx of 38,560 refugees from the Famine to their city, in 1847, not only challenged public officials, and strained local resources in what would amount to the greatest civic crisis in the young city's history, the spring and summer of "Black '47" would leave an indelible set of images regarding the nature and character of "the Irish"

In the summer of 1847 the Toronto Waterfront witnessed one of the greatest human tragedies in the history of the city. Between May and October of that year, over 38,000 Irish Famine emigrants arrived from Ireland at a time when the city's population was just 20,000 people.
From Toronto's Island Airport, it's a short walk to Ireland Park to contemplate the Great Famine with four bronze statues of Irish immigrants arriving at the Toronto wharves in 1847, modeled after the Dublin Departure Memorial; tomorrow evening at 7:30 a meetup of bloggers and tweeters at the Irish Embassy Pub to raise a glass to our friends on the Emerald Isle and salute Rossa McMahon for hosting this Blawg Review #264 to mark National Famine Memorial Day in Ireland.


Who's gonna meetup at the Irish Embassy Pub on Monday, May 17th? Let us know if you can be there and we'll add you to this list.

Ed. @blawgreview
Connie Crosby @conniecrosby
Omar HaRedeye @OmarHaRedeye
Antonin Pribetic @AntoninPribetic

We'll be there from around 7:30 pm until they throw us out.



Everyone's welcome, so please help us spread the word on Twitter.

Mothers Day Blawg Review



She Negotiates, She Succeeds, She Networks, She Transforms, and She Resolves.

She mothers. In honor of mothers this Mothers Day, Victoria Pynchon hosts Blawg Review #263 on her newest blog that celebrates women, in law and in life.

World Press Freedom Day



Blawg Review #262 to mark Word Press Freedom Day is hosted on the Public Intellectual blog, not a law blog.
Freedom starts with democratizing knowledge. It’s hard to imagine a democracy without a free press and freedom of speech. Anyone can claim to be a proponent of free speech. But most people are flip-floppers on free speech. The First Amendment is a lightswitch that they turn on an off as it suits their agenda.

Have you ever met a person who openly admitted to being against “free speech”? That seems to be an undesirable position, even among those who are in fact the First Amendment’s enemies; I find that such people don’t classify whatever they’re opposing as “free speech.” Instead, they redefine it as something that sounds unpleasant, such as “hate speech”; that way its easier to get people on board with denouncing it.
Check out the links selected for this special edition of Blawg Review on World Press Freedom Day.