Roger Smith surveys legal news on the other side of the Atlantic
A summer stay in Saratoga Springs, once famous for its spas and now for its racecourse, has reawakened an interest in US legal developments. This was largely because I was staying on a lake with a fellow lawyer interested in discussing such matters. He also encouraged me to renew my digital subscription to The New York Times, whose coverage of legal—as other—issues puts even the best of the British press in the shade. But, had I been more aware of history at the time, it might also have been—as a judge later pointed out to me—because the city was the birthplace of the American Bar Association (ABA) in 1878. This had from the beginning high aspirations for its members. They were to be “attorneys of unquestionable professional attainments, men who made waves in their community, state and nation”. Certainly, there are enough issues to detain men, and now women, of such eminence—many of them very similar to those over here.
