What use (if any) may be made of settled practice in statutory interpretation and what are the potential justifications for its use? Debate about the use of settled practice is often framed in terms of a tension between legal certainty, on the one hand, and legal correctness in giving effect to Parliament's will, on the other. That account presents a false choice. This article explores the use of settled practice and argues that it has a legitimate role to play in statutory interpretation and one that is consistent with the prevailing approach of the courts to statutory interpretation.

The paper argues that the principle of technological neutrality in copyright law is best grasped, not as a policy-driven imperative seeking to adapt copyright law to the exigencies of the digital environment, but rather as a principle immanent in the modern concept of copyright subject matter providing that merely technical or non-expressive uses of works of authorship do not attract liability. Technological neutrality is but a corollary of originality; that is, of the elementary proposition that copyright law protects original expression and nothing but original expression.

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.

The logical “slippery slope” argument is of key relevance to the ongoing debate about “assisted dying”. The argument runs that if the principle of respect for autonomy and the principle of beneficence justify voluntary euthanasia, then the principle of beneficence justifies non-voluntary euthanasia. Several prominent scholars of medical law and medical ethics have either rejected or at least not accepted the argument, including Gerald Dworkin and Raymond Frey; Margaret Battin; Hallvard Lillehammer; Stephen Smith; Robert Young; Emily Jackson; and Steven Daskal. This paper analyses their reasoning and finds it wanting. It concludes that the logical argument stands unrebutted and merits much greater attention.

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 essay argues that a defining characteristic of modern law – the distinctive way in which it judges its addressees – will disappear. After sketching the distinctive nature of modern law's judgment, I show that it is part of a broader regulatory paradigm (rule or East Coast regulation) which is itself being superseded. Technological management is the alternative regulatory paradigm and I examine its rise and salience, showing how it might, in combination with the advent of ubiquitous computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, cure a range of alleged pathologies that mark contemporary legal systems. The essay also demonstrates why technological management is now our regulatory default, its salience flowing from changes in the nature of our thinking about, and deployment of, power. The essay combines the work of Roger Brownsword, a leading contemporary jurist of technological management, with that of the world-renowned social theorist Michel Foucault.

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.

In Abbey National Building Society v Cann, the House of Lords held that a mortgagee who has funded the purchase of the mortgaged title to land (an “acquisition creditor”) has a right over the land that binds any other grantee of the purchaser. This article considers the basis for and limits of this principle, in light of its origins. It argues that the cases treat the lender's financial contribution as an independent source of an equitable interest in the purchased asset, rather than as a reason why the grant in favour of the lender takes effect earlier in time than the grant in favour of any third party. This has important and desirable consequences for the scope of the principle, rendering it more coherent with general principles of English property law and allowing for an apportionment solution in some situations involving co-contributors to acquisition.

This article uses Atiyah and Summer's categorisation of the attributes of formal legal reasoning in Form and Substance in Anglo-American Law to examine the type of legal reasoning process used by the courts in England and Wales when determining the second stage of vicarious liability. The analysis shows that, although remaining formal in nature, the shift away from the Salmond test has resulted in a shift in the type of form used by the courts. It is suggested that future guidance issued by the Supreme Court to lower courts when determining the second stage of vicarious liability needs to take account of this change for the guidance to be effective.