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Editorial

Welcome to the first issue of Volume 2 of the European Journal of Law and Technology. This first year has been a learning process as the editorial team have tried to build a journal which reflects technology issues as they relate to the wider field of law - not just straight copyright or data protection issues, for example.

We have tried to encourage submissions which relate technology to the more traditional areas of law, and believe we have succeeded in this issue. David Lewis extends his well known expertise on whistleblowing to consider how data protection affects this developing area of law; Julia Hornle has looked to the criminalising of online behaviours in response to pornography; Gregor Heissl considers the tricky question of human rights in an electronic, borderless world; and James Griffin looks again at the 'problem' for contract law which arose in the Pro-CD case.

This issue also has a commentary from one of my own students - Conall O'Reilly - which was a submission as an essay and which the editorial team felt worthy of publishing. We are, of course, more than happy to consider the work from students when it reaches a high level and welcome encouragement to students to submit.

Finally, we have papers which were developed for the Bi-Annual SubTech meeting (held in Zaragoza). SubTech has a long history of encouraging research into the application of the computer to the legal process. This was the field in which I first researched and I admit to some disappointment that it has not become a more productive field - it certainly offers an interesting area to research. It might, of course, have become more vibrant if those in the legal system - judges as well as lawyers - did not have such a suspicious attitude to any research which might upset their earnings or their location in the legal hierarchy.

The SubTech papers by Cella et. al., Greenstein, Tisconria and Rossi, and Ruschel et. al. deal with one of the application fields - legal education - which has been more successful in encouraging research. Marc Lauritsen (the organising force behind SubTech) briefly outlines why researchers in the field should consider attending the 2012 event at New York Law School.

This issue has been produced with the aid of our newly recruited Editorial Assistant, Mary McLaughlin (currently studying for a PhD in methodologies for allocating legal aid funding). Mary has had to quickly discover just how fragmented and awkward is the process of producing a 'clean' html document suitable for publication in the journal. The steps include using the program at word2cleanhtml.com, editing with a program editor (Crimson Editor), running through the Tidy program, and then outputting a version to pdf via Open Office. Hopefully you find the final outputs worth the effort.

Philip Leith