Section 4(1)(a) of the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015 states that it is an offence for any person to hold another person in servitude or slavery. In February 2018, John Miller and Robert McPhee appeared at the High Court in Glasgow, charged on indictment with this offence. In defining both ‘servitude’ and ‘slavery’, the court was obliged, per s 4(2) of the 2015 Act, to have due regard to the understanding of these terms which has evolved out of the jurisprudence of Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). ‘Slavery’, then, was said to denote ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the rights of ownership are exercised’. If, however, the definition of ‘slavery’ necessarily ‘involves rights of ownership’, then it follows that any enactment of law specifically proscribing slavery is nugatory. Indeed, in Miller, the court ultimately held that ‘there was no evidence upon which they could hold that the complainer had been held in a state of slavery’. This paper consequently asks whether or not in passing s 4(1)(a) of the 2015 Act, Parliament criminalised an impossible action.

This paper presents the findings of the first empirical study of the experiences of young lawyers who have entered an increasingly uncertain profession following a highly competitive education and recruitment process. These ‘millennial lawyers’ are framed by a narrative of ‘difference’. This ‘difference’ is commonly articulated negatively and as a challenge to organisational and professional norms. However, our findings suggest a more complex reality. In its synthesis of work on structure and agency, with the temporal focus required by generational sociology, this paper advances an original approach to the analysis of organisational and professional change within contemporary legal practice. Drawing on new empirical research, it demonstrates that although our sample shares many field-level expectations, there is also considerable stress, unhappiness and discomfort. This is generated by a complex interaction between the lawyers’ expectations of practice, and the structuring properties of the field. Thus, the capacity for organisational and professional change is more comprehensively understood within a temporal frame. This paper challenges academic and professional paradigms of generational change within the legal field. It concludes with recommendations for legal educators and the profession which foreground the complexity of millennial lawyers’ expectations of practice.

A number of Masters and a Registrar have recently indicated that, when exercising High Court jurisdiction, they are not bound strictly to follow prior decisions made by Judges in the High Court. This represents a notable departure from the position established by and within the High Court, where since the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875 an unquestioning obeisance of the Master and Registrar towards such decisions has been generally expected and offered. Delving into questions of power, authority and jurisdiction, and examining relevant legislation such as the Civil Procedure Rules, this paper constructs and analyses various arguments for and against recognising the co-equivalence of decisions of Judges, Masters and Registrars in the High Court.

Friedrich Nietzsche proposed the ‘Eternal Recurrence’ thought experiment in his book, The Gay Science (1882). Drawing on ancient Greek and Indian philosophy, Eternal Recurrence is the idea that with infinite time and matter events will occur again and again without end. While not (quite) infinite, English and Welsh insolvency law does have a sufficient and significant history that reveals numerous examples of this phenomenon of repetition. This paper examines some of the patterns of repetition within the law and reform processes and how ‘broad’, ‘narrow’, and ‘deep’ Eternal Recurrence applies to English and Welsh insolvency law. Three examples of Eternal Recurrence are examined: (1) the plight of the unsecured creditor; (2) the quest for protection, including the use of security devices; and (3) the accountability of directors in corporate insolvency, with specific reference to human rights protection for directors versus insolvency law objectives for the benefit of creditors. Finally, suggestions are provided as to why ‘insolvency’ Eternal Recurrence is problematic, particularly for law reform development and the reform of insolvency law in England and Wales.

‘Revenge pornography’ is a concept which embraces a broad spectrum of the non-consensual distribution of private sexual images. Acknowledging the harms that arise from this practice and the human rights implications of ‘revenge pornography’, this paper focuses on the difficulty of removing those images from the Internet. It considers the legal vehicles which can be employed to force websites and third-party operators to remove private sexual images, including privacy law and copyright notice and takedown systems. It concludes that the piecemeal approach to image removal is insufficient, and that a more cohesive and appropriate approach to image removal is required to ensure that victim-survivors’ rights to private and family life are properly protected.

This paper presents the findings of an empirical study conducted with local enforcement agents in two areas in England regarding the implementation of the anti-social behaviour injunction which succeeded the anti-social behaviour order (ASBO). These findings shed light on the procedure followed by local enforcement agents when dealing with an incident of anti-social behaviour. The data presented suggests that despite the recent legislative amendments, much of the regulation of anti-social behaviour still takes place in the ‘shadows’ with local enforcement agents utilising a range of informal interventions before applying to court for the issue of an injunction. Moreover, it is argued that despite the repeal and replacement of the ASBO by what appears to be a purely civil measure, many of the criticisms raised about the order and its potential misuse remain largely unaddressed.

It is common for a legal system to allow a person, in certain circumstances, to gain ownership of land by possessing it for a period of time. This is certainly true of both Scotland and England, although what is precisely required for possession to be established may differ on particular points between the two. One point on which the two may differ is the effect of a unilateral permission to occupy that is given to someone currently occupying the land without any right to be there. This point has most recently been considered from the point of view of English law in Smith v Molyneaux [2016] UKPC 35, [2017] 1 P & CR 7. In this paper, that case and the issues it raises are considered from the point of view of Scots law. It is found that this point raises more general questions about the nature of the mental element of possession, the state of mind with which one must occupy the property in order to be considered a possessor.

In her early work, the feminist legal scholar Erika Rackley uses the image of Ronald Dworkin's superjudge Hercules to shed light on the experience of the woman judge and on law and adjudication in the liberal legal order. She sees Hercules as representing the judge ‘who inhabits our legal imagination’, and as conjuring up problematic notions of unimpeachable wisdom, detached neutrality and super-humanism. This paper assesses Rackley's argument in light of the feminist judgments scholarship that has emerged in the meantime. It contests Rackley's claim that Hercules, or what he represents, is a patriarchal influence in the real world of law, and argues that he might instead be understood to accommodate, or even to encourage, principled evolutions in law along the lines of those suggested by the feminist judgments literature. This assessment is done mainly through the lens of Stokes v CBS Clonmel, a judgment of the Irish Supreme Court concerning indirect discrimination that was later the subject of a feminist judgment in the Northern/Irish Feminst Judgments volume. The broader aim of this assessment is to interrogate the insights and implications of feminist judgments scholarship.

The paper is in four parts. Part 1 places feminist approaches to adjudication in broader theoretical context. Part 2 considers Dworkin's theory of adjudication and Rackley's critique. Part 3 sets out the approach taken by both the real-world and feminist judges in the Stokes case. Part 4 critiques Rackley's take on Hercules in light of the approach adopted in those judgments and draws on preceding analysis to interrogate the insights and implications of feminist judgments scholarship.

Society thinks, talks, and communicates in ways which are inherently different now from the pre-Internet era. Hashtags in particular have transformed community formation around a particular topic, issue, or goal. A new and relatively under-studied phenomenon is that of ‘hashtag hijacking’, where individuals or groups use a particular hashtag to draw attention to arguments and narratives which undermine or oppose the hashtag's objective. Most of the current literature looks at hashtag hijacking as a positive outlet for counter-discourse/counter-narratives to challenge dominant groups. This study, however, looks at the ‘dark side’ of hashtag hijacking, where groups use trolling tactics similar to the Alt_Right to reinforce misogynistic views. The hijacking of three hashtags is explored in this study: #notacriminal, #women2drive, and #mydressmychoice, to explore feminist theories on the role of social media in a ‘public space’. Does Twitter function as one common public sphere where inequalities are so deeply embedded that minority voices have no hope of being heard? Or does Twitter function as a meeting place for multiple competing public spheres, thus allowing minority – and in this case feminist – voices to be heard?