The Free Movement Forum will, I hope, be an essential resource and outlet for immigration lawyers. Joining is also, of course, a good way to support the blog and the work that has goes into it if you value that and find it useful.

The launch seems to have gone well. The sign up process is working smoothly, I think, and there are 70 members already. My thanks go to those who have shown their support by joining so early. There are so far 27 different topics under discussion, including ideas on Chen and permanent residence, a challenge to foreign national prisoners being retained in prisons at their end of sentence, renouncing British citizenship because of McCarthy and, er, some general letting off steam. Discussion seems… lively! The titles and authors of the most recently discussed topics now appear in the sidebar above the Twitter feed but cannot be accessed unless you are a member. Forum pages have been added to the menu bar at the top and access to the full list of recent topics is quick from there for members.

Initially I struggled to create a separate way for organisations to sign up for a single log in for several people to use but that is now sorted and available. If there is demand I was also thinking of adding another option for purchasing up to 10 log-ins for medium or larger firms for £100.

Some additional content will be made available to forum members. In the near future there are a couple of things I plan to upload. Someone was kind enough to share a heap of OPIs obtained by Freedom of Information Request on which I’d like to ‘crowdsource’ the research, which has so far been beyond me. If there are any particularly important bits I’ll put them on the main blog in due course with credit to the finder. I was also reminded recently of some case law research work that I did for IAS many moons ago which I’ll post up as well as a sort of bonus for forum members.

I’ve tweaked the blog format again very slightly. The header image height is reduced slightly. When Free Movement first started offering email subscriptions the WordPress software, which the blog is based on, did not offer this facility so I turned to Google Feedburner. WordPress now have their own slightly more elegant solution which delivers emails the moment a blog post is published (within a time window that you specify) and sends out a separate email for each blog post. I have switched to that service for new email subscribers. The old Feedburner emails will continue as before, though, so there is no need to switch. A Linked In follow button has been added for the newly set up Renaissance Chambers page there.

I think that’s it for now. Setting up the forum has been time consuming and a few significant tribunal cases have slipped in under the radar in the meantime. They’ll be written up in the next couple of days or weeks when time allows – thanks for your patience.