Summer nights, street lights, cold frights & the Saturday Law Interview

So summer has finally arrived and that feeling of sleeping with the bedroom window slightly ajar is indescribable. There is something about the fresh smell of night air in pitch darkness. Except, modern living seldom permits that state of lying in absolute darkness. The fluid curves of green and red LED lights, flickerless as the eyes just start to blur before the realm of dreams. When I wake up in the middle of the night, this is a when not if, the very same green and orange had taken on an amber permanence that fleshes out the shapes of desks, chairs, bookcases and everything in between. This all changed recently. Now, there is the brightest streetlamp along the railway track that runs along the back of my window. The blue green brightness that peeks through the gap in the curtain is a reminder of what Damon Albarn declared almost two decades ago, modern life is rubbish.

Disaster struck in Bangladesh in the last week of April. Disaster as a concept is not unusual to the region with constant typhoon batterings from the Bay of Bengal, floods and even the odd political upheaval but this most recent disaster struck a chord in the west. A factory building that had been declared unsafe just a day ago was allowed to light up in the cacophony of sewing machines. As the machines churned out ever so colourful fabrics heading for the even brightly lit shops of the western shopping malls, under all that pressure of sweaty bodies and corporate greed, the foundations of the Savar factory collapsed. Bodies dead and alive were being found for weeks until the death toll rolled to some 1100. In our Saturday Law Interview, Barrister Monirul Alam, a commercial and corporate lawyer from Bangladesh spoke not with bitterness, but with a sense of pragmatism about what could be achieved if the legal machinery and corporate social responsibility rebelled against dischord and for once, saw the textile worker as part of the global fashion family.

Clothed in Blood: Law, Morality & Responsibility within the Global Fashion Industry

Last Thursday evening I had a walking phone conversation with my TheLawMap partner in crime. It was the perfect walk along a weedy moat running along the side of a busier jogging hotspot in the heart of Cardiff. If life is a journey, that balmy walk was fragrant and full of optimism. While I seem to be repeating the sentiment each time I write within these pages, the four conversations billed as 'the Saturday Law Interview' have explored such varied areas of law and justice, and pleasingly, exposed the site to a new level of readership that I had not anticipated at the outset. So while looking forward to next week's conversation with the Scottish Criminal Lawyer Paul Mullen, it is once again my pleasure to thank those who had spoken to us during the previous weeks: