Equality before the law is a foundational principle of the common law and is of particular importance for administrative law, given the connection between judicial review and the rule of law. Analysis as to the precise requirements of this principle can help us better to understand the role that obligations to act consistently play within judicial review. This article will examine whether consistency ought to be classed as a separate ground of review and argue that this is unnecessary. Examination of the role that legal equality plays within common law reason generally will shed light on the role that it plays within administrative law in particular. Consistency is best conceived as a background principle, informed by the value of legal equality, housed within reasonableness review and not as a separate ground of review that could elide the distinction between review and appeal.

Rivka Weill claims that in the nineteenth century the foundation of the UK constitution changed from parliamentary sovereignty to popular sovereignty, originally as a matter of constitutional convention but today as a matter of law. I argue, to the contrary, that parliamentary sovereignty as a legal principle and popular sovereignty as a political principle are perfectly compatible. Constitutional conventions are essentially political not legal requirements. Therefore, a constitutional convention requiring popular approval of constitutional change, if it ever existed, would not have violated parliamentary sovereignty. But if it did exist, it was displaced by the Parliament Act 1911 and has not been revived since. Moreover, there is no evidence that courts today have legal authority to enforce any requirement, conventional or legal, requiring such approval.

Censure, blame and harms are central concepts in sentencing that have evolved over the years to take into account social context and experiential knowledge. Flexibility, however, remains limited as the current analysis in sentencing focuses on the offender while failing to engage with the state's contribution in creating wrongs and harms. This risks giving rise to defective practices of responsibility since the state can also contribute to their production. The following article presents a complementary and additional framework within sentencing to account for state censure, blame and harms. The framework is rooted in communicative theories of punishment that integrate a responsive understanding of censure and a relational account of responsibility.

This paper looks at the property status of digital files, such as electronic documents, under English law. We argue that, while mere information is rightly not considered property, digital files are not mere information. Instead, they are distinct virtual objects that exist at the logical – or software – layer of a computer system. Property law could recognise digital files as a new, third kind of thing, alongside things in possession and in action. Doing so might help resolve disputes over access to digital files, by providing proprietary remedies similar to those available for paper documents.

It is widely accepted that tort law operates according to a hierarchy of protected interests. Some commentators suggest that this hierarchy can be put to dispositive uses in cases characterised by a clash of interests held respectively by the claimant and defendant (the inferior interest giving way). Others argue that thinking in terms of a hierarchy of interests sheds light on three unusual aspects of tort law: viz. the existence of torts that are actionable per se, the existence of strict liability torts, and the existence of actions in which injunctive relief is routinely awarded even though compensatory damages are tort law's default remedy. This article tests both claims. It concludes that an intuitively appealing hierarchy of interests can be identified, and that it might well possess dispositive significance all other things being equal. But it also observes that all other things are seldom equal, and that departures from the hierarchy occur for various reasons that can be clearly identified and which should be borne in mind when thinking about its dispositive utility. It also urges caution in making connections between the status of certain interests and the fact that they are protected by torts that are actionable per se, strict liability torts and torts in connection with which injunctions are awarded almost as a matter of course.

This article examines global vaccine inequity during the COVID-19 pandemic. We critique intellectual property (IP) law under the 1994 WTO TRIPS Agreement, and specifically, the role that IP has played in enabling the inequities of production, distribution and pricing in the COVID-19 vaccine context. Given the failure of international response mechanisms, including COVAX and C-TAP, to address vaccine inequity, we argue the TRIPS waiver proposal should be viewed as offering a necessary and proportionate legal measure for clearing IP barriers that cannot be achieved by existing TRIPS flexibilities. Finally, we reflect on the waiver debate in the wider context of TRIPS and the need to boost global pandemic preparedness.