This paper explores understandings of harm in law through the application of a feminist perspective. Drawing on the idea of harm as a social construct, the paper considers the role of law in shaping perceptions of when a harm has occurred and whether it should be redressed. These themes are illustrated by means of a close legal and contextual analysis of the House of Lords decision in Waters v Metropolitan Police Commissioner, in which a woman was allegedly bullied at work for reporting she had been raped by a fellow officer. The paper raises questions about why this particular claimant had difficulty establishing that she had suffered harm, despite alleging 89 separate hostile acts by fellow officers, and even though the courts who heard her claim assumed for the purposes of legal argument that the facts alleged were true. It is argued that the narrowness of the approach adopted by most of the judges who heard Ms Waters' claim precluded recognition of the seriousness of the allegations and the social, political, and legal need to provide redress.

Although the constitutional reform programme undertaken by the Blair administration is formally consistent with the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, it is clear that the human rights and devolution legislation, in particular, significantly alter the political and constitutional environment within which Parliament's legislative powers are exercised. This paper considers whether it is meaningfiul, within this new constitutional setting, to adhere to the traditional notion of sovereignty. It is argued that the disparity between a Parliament whose powers are formally unlimited yet increasingly constrained, in political terms, by norms based on fundamental rights and devolved governance may be accommodated, in the short term, by means of constitutional conventions which trace the constitutionally acceptable limits of legislative action by Parliament. However, following examination of the nature of convention and its relationship with law and constitutional principle, it is argued that the possibility arises, in the long term, that conventional limits upon legislative freedom may ultimately evolve into legal limiis, thus ensuring that the fundamental values embraced by the legal order are acknowledged not merely in pragmatic or conventional terms, but as a matter of constitutional law.

Court decisions concerning the life and death of patients become more and more frequent in the context of medical practice. One of the most controversial decisions in this area in recent years has been the decision of the Court of Appeal in Re A (Conjoined Twins: Medical Treatment), authorising the separation of conjoined twins. This paper will argue that the decision was flawed both on legal and moral grounds and that its potential implications for future cases are more far-reaching than the judgment itself suggests.

In recent years the courts have been faced with the problem of deciding what status should be given to marriages that are celebrated outside the provisions of the Marriage Act 1949 yet believed to be valid by the parties to them. Some such marriages have been classified as non-marriages, while others have been saved by the application of the presumption in favour of marriage. The decisions are unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. It will be suggested that the concept of non-marriage should be confined to ceremonies that in no way purport to be marriages. The presumption in favour of marriage should also be limited to situations where there is a valid basis for presuming a marriage rather than being used to avoid dealing with the deficiencies of the law.

So much of what, so far, has constituted the grammar of mainstream historical discourse on English law can be broadly characterised as being primarily concerned with either formal legal institutions or their socio-political context. While such histories are generally useful, they fail to see what other-histories – what radically different stories – could be told instead. Such a web of other-histories, it is here suggested, require both time and imagination. By temporarily leaving mainstream historical accounts and entering into the time of legal history the centrality of so many institutional and socio-political histories of English law may have to be reconsidered. In particular, what would become clear is that one type of legal history needs urgently to be told – a history of the ‘blotted-out’. Neither included in mainstream legal history, nor excluded from it – neither visible nor memorable – the history of the blotted-out is the history of what can be found, so commonly and ordinarily, in everyday life. Mainstream legal history is either unaware of, or uninterested in, the blotted-out. Yet, it is precisely a history of the blotted-out which, importantly, would guard, in history, the possibility of law's most original imagination.

This paper attempts to analyse the extent to which elements of the criminal law admit uniform definition across offences, and the implications of that question. That debate contributes to recent scholarship on the scope, purpose and content of the general part. I argue that there are elements which can be defined uniformly, elements which cannot be defined uniformly and elements which, although they are subject to variation depending on offence context, ought to be considered in general by the courts. The considerations that are important in thinking about uniformity are outlined in each of these cases. This has implications for the way in which we think about the general part. Generality is a question of both degree and kind. Consequently, the scope, purpose and content of the general part are more complex than has previously been thought. In the final section I sketch some of the implications that this analysis of the general part might have for methodology generally and, in particular, for social theory.