The Times and Harry The Owl

Trigger warnings on legal rulings??
What other legal rulings might attract trigger warnings one wonders?

Same here mcduffy, I read the first few paragraphs at midnight and just thought "huh?" It does need a bit of explaining.

I agree with PP that this really is disturbing. What I would like to know is how normal it is. Does this publisher (or any other) normally seek to edit law reports in order to reflect particular ideological Positions? Do they normally seek help from outside lobby groups when doing that?

It's incredibly poorly written for what is actually an extremely important story.

Educational publishers should not be editing or censoring legal rulings to create what some of their editors personally deem a 'safe space' for legal students or deciding what information they are to be allowed to have. Would they do this for any other topic? I'm not surprised the author resigned in disgust.

knowing a few uber-woke young editors in publishing, im not surprised.

I'm glad you're all here to interpret, it was a bit early for me to understand it!

Hachette is a huge publisher (I used to work for them) that includes many imprints and divisions, that have been made up of several separate smaller companies, all with their own MDs who then report upwards.. Hodder Education is just one, and are one of the main textbook publishers in the UK. I doubt very much this goes right to the top of Hachette or that this is 'hypocrisy' in the way being suggested above.

I suspect this will be zealous overreach on the part of one particular editor/publishing team that has been allowed to get completely out of control.

I'll be interested to see what the top brass at Hachette has to say. The CEO will not be best pleased, I imagine.

It's quite a complicated story, written pretty straight so quite hard to get the gist of it. But yes why were mermaids asked, and why was their feedback so influential on what's meant to be just a factual representation of a law case? WTF with trigger warnings and Safe spaces needed for law students 🙄

This is appalling. An attempt to conceal and distort a legal ruling which will (assuming the exam boards are not equally insane) disadvantage those A level students and teachers who read it and use it as an example in their exams. A publisher deliberately feeding A level students lies because it doesn't like the truth. WTF?

And it may be - possibly?? - that the person at Hachette responsible for this was one of those disgruntled employees who protested Hachette's decision to support JK Rowling originally, ie that the right hand did not know what the left hand was doing.

But I suspect this hypocrisy goes right to the top. I find it unlikely that such a decision would have been made without knowledge at the highest levels given the political and commercial sensitivity involved.

We shall see - in how Hachette responds.

If it immediately apologises and sacks those responsible, maybe this was the action of a rogue employee.

If not, then Hachette have no moral compass and are not fit to publish a law review, or frankly, anything else.

This is disgraceful.

I don't think Harry was overstating the importance of this article.

Although his reference to 'not that author' was a bit confusing.

This describes an incredibly important and worrying example of censorship. Hachette's actions are extremely close to the kind of fascist or Stasi-like censorship of free speech that the judgement itself referred to.

It is yet another, bitter irony, that it was Hachette - JK Rowling's publisher - who were undertaking this extreme censorship of the truth re a judgement ABOUT FREE SPEECH at exactly the same time thay they were publicly stating that they backed JK Rowling for free speech reasons!!

If the celebrated author JK Rowling had written the plot (in both senses) herself, I doubt she could have come up with a more pointed example of how free speech is currently being undermined or of fascist overreach.

And it is indeed fascist, in that it seeks quite deliberately to hide the truth and undermine the rule of law, in favour of a politically-preferred version of the truth. Moreover, what Hachette is trying to hide the facts about is that police actions giving people criminal records for thought crimes had been judged fascist and Stasi-like!

I wonder what JK Rowling's views and actions will be? She is, after all Hachette's golden goose, so they cannot afford not to support her directly.

But behind her back, they are undermining everything she believes in, and indeed, the whole ethos of her books, which are allegories of the fight against fascism.

Hypocrisy does not get worse than this.Attacks on free speech do not get worse than this. This absolutely stinks.

I’m wondering how Mr Justice Julian Knowles’s feels about his ruling and comments re transgender issues being described as “offensive“?

Are there other instances where a biased lobby group gets to rewrite the legal facts and findings of a case to make their bias look better?

‘Management at Hodder Education, part of Hachette UK, referred the article on the ruling to Mermaids, asking it to suggest “examples we can use to counteract the tone and opinions in the piece” and to suggest changes to “anything you feel is untrue, unfair and/or offensive”.

In response to the invitation to suggest changes, the head of legal and policy at Mermaids sent four closely typed pages, including a comment that the article “doesn’t come over as balanced”’.

In response to criticism on twitter for mermaids overreach, Helen (mimmymum) states this is a non story of the author having a ‘hissy fit’ and leaving.

twitter.com/mimmymum/status/1292257211247480836

The views of a high court judge summarising a test case.

To students learning law. Tomorrow's lawyers.

Bloody hell.

suggested in vain that one way out of the impasse was for A-Level Law Review to pioneer “trigger warnings” about articles that some students might find offensive and provide “safe spaces” for students by providing independent sources of advice at the end of potentially hard-hitting articles.

FFS! I really hope I never get charged with a serious crime, if this is the level of emotional fortitude that the lawyers of tomorrow have!

Share token

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/73178706-d8d7-11ea-b191-4a02022fcddf?shareToken=ed75f70e5820e727fc088359a080c621

Here's the quote from the article: Even before [sending it to Mermaids], Hodder had heavily edited the court report, removing two-thirds of the original, explaining: “We also have to be very careful how we present certain views.”

As I understand the article, I don't think the censoring was directly done by Mermaids - they were consulted, but it was Hachette / Hodder editors who cut large parts of the original article because they were worried about causing offence.

Sending the article to be reviewed by Mermaids is a bit of a giveaway of bias, but I find it even more disturbing to think even if they hadn't involved Mermaids the editors sounded quite prepared to hack the article so it omitted key remarks by the judge simply because they didn't want to upset (some) readers. And if the author hadn't resigned, we might never have known.

It is extremely disturbing. This is a law magazine for A Level law students where a factual report on a high court ruling dealing freedom of speech has been censored by a political lobby group who did not like the ruling and claimed that A-level students would find it "offensive".

The censorship was so extreme that the author of the report, and chair of the magazine, resigned.

It's just extremely frightening to think that a lobby group is now controlling what law students are allowed to learn about the law.

so William Schatner is tweeting and being RT by fair cop

More concerning is not what law students might think but what they are required to write to pass their A levels...

Mermaids at the invitation of Hachette decided that students should not be allowed to read the complete ruling of a high court judge because they didn't like it. So they censored/changed it to suit them better.

So Hachette, a major publisher, asks a lobby group to censor/approve its resources for law students? That is truly terrifying.

More worrying is the probability that current Law Students are a product of woke culture and actual think this is acceptable.

that even a court ruling (right or wrong) should be edited so an not to in any infer that maybe, just maybe trans activists are occassionally wrong!

So we have a civil war to get rid of the divine right of kings, but now have willing walked into be subjected to the divine right of trans!

It is evidence of a worrying level of political interference to the law by a lobby group though.

Yeah a little bit more on the share token but not much. I’d want to read the original and the 4 page Mermaid commentary
That would make an interesting lesson on bias for A level students, law or otherwise.