Pavel Melika

Oh the shame!

So long since I have made a post to this blog! Huge apologies. I am going to go with the excuse that I have been nose deep into the books studying contract, tort and trusts. Believe it or not, up to you. Do have some small news to report and that is that I am off to the British Council this week to register for exams. Another couple hundred quid flying out of my pocket later this month when I pay the school. However the interesting and fun thing is that "I graduate next year". Haha what a great thing to be able to say. Would that it were 2013 already but to be fair let's try and squeeze as much out of 2012 as we can.

To the breaking point

I've written previously about how pressure brought to bear on defendants often is too much for them to deal with and they wind up confessing to crimes that they did not commmitt while under pressure. http://llbblogging.blogspot.com/2010/09/under-pressure.html

An interesting article in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/us/tough-sentences-help-prosecutors-push-for-plea-bargains.html?_r=2&hp the other week helps to shed light on why someone might do such a thing.

Yeah baby!

Back from Oktoberfest and found a lovely present sitting on my desk upon my return...no not the buxom blonde I was hoping for but rather the box from the university with my materials for this year. Now I can begin to study in earnest. The only piece of the puzzle which is missing is access to the course pages on the university's website. Hopefully this will come in a few days. As I wrote previously, enrollment this year was a fiasco so getting these materials so quickly helps to make up for it a bit. Oddly enough in the box was a book about land law, given that I am not taking land law this year I can only imagine that this is compensation for my pain and suffering. In any event, quite happy to have it and get rolling.

Denning stikes again...

Another good one from Denning which made me laugh, this time from Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking Ltd [1971]:

"None of those cases has any application to a ticket which is issued by an automatic machine. The customer pays his money and gets a ticket. He cannot refuse it. He cannot get his money back. He may protest to the machine, even swear at it. But it will remain unmoved."

Arrrrrgh!

Pure frustration! After waiting months to be able to reenroll and send money to my university, finally today they have access on their internet portal. The problem is that the system is so very poorly designed that I was unable to register for the courses which I need. To add insult to injury there is no way to go back and start again. Now I am at their not so tender mercy to try and enroll. I cannot imagine that a school which has been doing this for over 150 years with thousands of students every year could have such poor admin support.

More results

Yesterday those students who are not located in Europe got their results. Of those I know, I saw a couple happy campers with 71's and the rest a mixed bag. Happily not many failures at all but a few disappointments. Hard to put rhyme or reason to the grades as you don't really know how people wrote or how they were graded. I would say that is perhaps the worst part of the school - lack of material feedback on your work. To be sure you get a grade, I honestly believe it is probably one you merit, but you lack a rationale behind it. It is a tradeoff to be sure but given the cost of getting feedback, I think I would prefer to go without...