The introduction of s 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, criminalising the disclosure of private sexual images, has been seen as a welcome step forward for curbing this abuse of privacy and the harmful effects it has on victims. However, while s 33 sidesteps any reference to ‘revenge pornography’, as the phenomenon has been termed in popular vernacular, little attention has been paid to the way in which narratives of revenge implicitly underpin and imbue the new offence, particularly its specific intent requirement. We argue this has serious implications for the treatment of s 33 offences in the courts and for sentencing. Drawing on cross-disciplinary conceptualisations of revenge, its recent criminal-legal history, and examples of media and parliamentary rhetoric, we claim that despite innumerable attempts to turn debate on disclosure of private sexual images towards consent, harm and privacy, there lurks within these discourses an assumption that the victim must have done something to deserve the treatment she received. Until the multiple harms of disclosure of private sexual images are recognised and explicit recommendations are made that scrutiny of victims’ behaviour should normally be inadmissible, we argue that the offence offers little in the way of redress.

Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 consumer contracts and consumer notices are required to be expressed in plain and intelligible language. This is a difficult concept to capture. Determining whether a contract is expressed in plain and intelligible language involves resource-intensive work by regulators and difficult adjudications by courts. This paper explores whether reading scores present a viable alternative. Can a simple computer program tell a consumer, a business, a regulator or the court that a particular contract is not expressed in plain and intelligible language? The paper begins by exploring the concept and role of plain and intelligible language in the Consumer Rights Act, before considering the ways that reading scores have developed and been used in legal contexts. We then report on the findings of an experimental examination of insurance contracts using a basket of reading scores, using our findings to draw conclusions about the utility of reading scores in determining whether a contract is expressed in plain and intelligible language. We find that reading scores can play a role in such determinations, but that further work is needed to provide appropriate tools for business, regulators and courts to use in assessing plain and intelligible language.

Studies of takings of property highlight the increasing penetration of state power into private life. Controversies regularly surround compensation provisions. Many academic analyses and decisions of the European Court of Human Rights have supported the proposition that market value offers the best approximation of just compensation. However, full market value compensation may not be guaranteed if the taking of property fulfils certain legitimate objectives of the ‘public interest’. To unpack the complexity surrounding compensation provisions under the European Convention on Human Rights, this paper adopts and develops a ‘law-and-community’ approach – an important dimension, not previously investigated in the study of takings of property – which sees ‘community’ as networks of social relations, and views law as not only grounded in community but also existing to regulate communal networks. This paper then identifies the limits of both Art 1, Protocol 1 of the ECHR and the current approaches to compensation in the light of this law-and-community approach. In so doing, the paper makes a distinctive contribution by offering a new socio-legal interpretation of controversies surrounding compensation for takings of property beyond the private/public divide and by proposing an alternative framework of engaging law and regulation in wider social life.

This paper explores law school portraits of women in law as a way to challenge the over-representation of men in law. Portraiture is a long-standing means by which professions celebrate worthy individuals and reproduce institutional values. In relation to law and the legal professions, portraits are predominantly of men and link law with masculine attributes, contributing to the visual and actual marginalisation of women in law's past and present. The paper begins by setting out why portraits of women exhibited in UK law schools are an important way to challenge gender inequalities in law. It then provides a snapshot of the gender dimensions of university and law school portraiture in the UK, before analysing the Inspirational Women of the Law exhibition at Newcastle Law School as a method of disrupting the dominant gendered visual order in law, and bringing into focus women in legal history.

This paper proposes the concept of a ‘hybrid institution’, defined with reference to certain institutions within the UK's constitutional order which provide oversight of national security processes. It focuses in particular on the Commissioners who have overseen and oversee the use of investigatory powers and the work of the intelligence services. These institutions, as was once said of another hybrid institution – the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation – are designed in order to operate within situations in which ‘potential conflicts between state power and civil liberties are acute, but information is tightly rationed’. They are ‘hybrid’ institutions in that they marry certain of the features characteristic of political institutions with others characteristic of legal institutions. The paper considers the relevant institutions and the role they play within the national security constitution, showing how their hybrid status facilitates the performance of a function which neither fully legal nor fully political institutions could fulfil.

The Legal Services Act 2007 effected major changes in the disciplinary system for solicitors in England and Wales. Both the practice regulator, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and a disciplinary body, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, were reconstituted as independent bodies and given new powers. Our concern is the impact of the Act on the disciplinary system for solicitors. Examination of this issue involves consideration of changes to regulatory institutions and the mechanics of practice regulation. Drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality, empirical evidence drawn from disciplinary cases handled by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and the Solicitors Regulation Authority in 2015 is used to explore potentially different conceptions of discipline informing the work of the regulatory institutions. The conclusion considers the implications of our findings for the future of the professional disciplinary system.

Patient choice in the context of National Health Service (NHS) reforms in England can refer to the law and policy underpinning patient movement between the NHS and private healthcare sector (in existence since the introduction of the NHS in 1948), as well as recent competition reforms of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the National Health Service (Procurement, Patient Choice and Competition) (No 2) Regulations 2013 and the 2014 Private Healthcare Market Investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). This paper highlights the existence of two discrete, yet related frameworks: the ‘NHS patient – private patient’ framework based on Department of Health, NHS England and latterly Clinical Commissioning Group policy, and the ‘NHS patient choice’ framework, derived from New Labour choice and competition policies and subsequently enshrined by the 2012 Act reforms. The juxtaposition of these frameworks underscores the symbiotic relationship between the NHS and private healthcare, which raises questions about the fitness for purpose of current policy. It also helps explain why the competition reforms are difficult to implement, and suggests that the knitting together of patient choice and competition may unravel following the 2012 Act reforms and CMA private healthcare market development.

This paper presents a history of New Zealand's accident compensation scheme as a struggle between two competing normative paradigms that justify the core reform of the replacement of civil actions for victims of personal injury with a comprehensive no-fault scheme. Under ‘community insurance’, the scheme represents the community taking moral and practical responsibility for members who are injured in accidents, while for ‘compulsory insurance’ the scheme is a specific form of compulsory accident insurance. Understanding the history of the scheme in this way helps explain both the persistence of the scheme and important changes made to it by different governments.

This paper explains how the concept of personal data should be delimited. Certainty on this matter is crucial, as it determines the material scope of the data protection obligations. The primary boundary delimiting the scope of personal data is the requirement that personal data ‘relate to’ an individual. The courts of the UK and the EU have sought to delineate this boundary, but there are serious difficulties in the present approaches that have emerged thus far. Two possible ways forward are suggested, taking into account the implications of the direct application of the GDPR in the UK.

The UK courts and the CJEU have often treated age discrimination as a less serious form of discrimination. This is reflected in the courts’ reluctance to offer rigorous scrutiny when evaluating whether age-differential treatment is objectively justified under anti-discrimination law. Further, a number of judges have asserted that age discrimination must be understood as different to other forms of discrimination, such as race or sex discrimination. This paper argues that age discrimination is not fundamentally different or prima facie less serious than other forms of discrimination. Age discrimination can undermine the same principles that paradigm forms of discrimination also undermine, including: creating inequality of opportunity by disadvantaging people because of a trait that is outside a person's control; undermining social equality by creating a hierarchy of social status between different groups; violating autonomy by diminishing people's capacity to have control over their lives; and communicating disrespect by conveying that particular groups have a diminished moral or social worth. It follows, contrary to the approach of much of the case law, that the courts should offer rigorous scrutiny of age-differential treatment to identify these harms and only permit age distinctions that are strictly tailored to enhance equality or other important values.