The importance of the subjects of litigation being able to tell their story directly to the decision maker is widely recognised as offering therapeutic benefits to all involved in the decision-making process. The Court of Protection makes life changing decisions for individuals on health and welfare matters, and it is clearly critical that the person at the centre of those proceedings (known as ‘P’) is given the opportunity for ‘direct engagement’ with the judge deciding their case. This paper interrogates the under-explored domain of the prevalence and forms in which ‘P’ has engaged directly with the judge (particularly by meeting with the judge without giving formal evidence) with the aid of a database of over 200 ‘health and welfare’ judgments. An integrated approach is adopted, drawing from these judgments, but also cross-referencing the far more advanced literature and case law on children meeting judges in the Family Court to explore some of the issues. This paper finds that the transplantation of practices from the Family Court to the Court of Protection has been problematic, has sometimes obscured P's direct contact with the judge in their own case, and jars with recent moves in the Court of Protection towards modelling empathetic judging and ‘standing in P's shoes’.

The Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Act 2015 entered into force on 13 April 2015. It is too soon for it to have been considered judicially, and it has not yet been subjected to sustained academic analysis. Accordingly, this article considers its impact. In doing so, it situates the Act in its social context and draws attention to the fact that it is part of a large network of statutes that share the same objectives. It is argued, contrary to prevailing views, that parts of the Act change the law. It is also maintained that the Act’s reach is not confined to personal injury cases or even to tort cases. It potentially applies far more widely, including to contractual actions that allege a failure to take reasonable care. In addition to analysing the Act, this article investigates why the legislature might want to restate the common law (which is what the Act does in part), whether replicating the common law is desirable and, if the legislature is bent on restating the common law, how it should go about doing so.

In constructing criminal policy the Irish legislature seems to be driven predominantly by a pragmatic and populist approach, in contrast to the rights-oriented jurisprudence of the Supreme Court. This paper describes the conflict between the courts and the legislature in relation to criminal justice matters in Ireland, particularly in the context of bail, the exclusionary rule and sentencing, and analyses the reasons for this divergence, drawing on the concept of penal populism. Although the Irish courts serve as a valuable bulwark against punitive populist policies, this paper considers if this failure to adhere to the desires of the legislature and to public opinion is anti-democratic. Furthermore, in assessing the apparent rift between the two arms of the Irish State, this paper highlights areas of criminal justice in which this conceptualisation of the legislature as punitive and the courts as rights-enforcing is unduly simplistic and possibly inaccurate.

English juries do not provide reasons for their verdicts. This paper argues that transparency is a fundamental value in modern decision making, and that reform is needed to trial by jury so that verdicts are routinely accompanied by explanations. It examines the options that exist to incorporate explained verdicts in the English criminal trial and concludes that accountability and legitimacy would be enhanced through the use of a trained, independent lay facilitator to chair the deliberation process and draft an explained verdict.

In law and discourse, it has typically been assumed that the religious freedom of state-funded religious schools must trump any competing right to non-discrimination on grounds of belief. For example, the Irish Constitution has been interpreted as requiring the broad exemption of denominational schools from the statutory prohibition on religious discrimination in school admissions. This stance is mirrored in the UK Equality Act 2010. Thus, religious discrimination in the public education context has been rationalised with reference to a ‘liberty-equality dichotomy’, which prioritises the integrity of faith schools' ‘ethos’, as an imperative of religious freedom. We argue that this familiar conceptual dichotomy generates a novel set of absurdities in this peculiar context. We suggest that the construction of religious freedom and non-discrimination as separate and antagonistic values rests on a conceptually flawed definition of religious freedom itself, which overlooks the necessary dependence of religious freedom on non-discrimination. Furthermore, it overstates the necessity, to religious freedom, of religious schools' ‘right to discriminate’. We argue for an alternative ordering of the values of religious freedom and non-discrimination – which we locate within the neo-republican theory of freedom as non-domination.

This paper offers a timely investigation into access to justice in rural areas through place-based research. The paper reports an empirical study designed to gain the local knowledge and personal experience of one particular group of rural dwellers in the hope that it might help encourage a wider discussion on access to rural justice. The research has been conducted within the wider socio-political context of austerity that provides a challenge to public-sector service delivery in general, alongside the particular legal impact of budget cuts on the provision of justice, with closures of large amounts of courts, the decline in legal aid provision and reductions in police numbers. Such are important issues for England and Wales as a whole, meaning that this research is contemporary and represents one of the first academic studies to specifically deal with the impact of austerity on access to justice. The value of this research is further heightened with its focus on the specific rural impact of such cuts as rural areas are those likely to face the biggest effect on provision while concomitantly being the least studied area of legal provision, with notably little scholarship in the past two decades into justice in rural England and Wales. Considering the damage these cuts may cause to rural justice is a current issue of utmost importance to the principle of access to justice. The paper offers the foundations upon which a new wave of academic attention to justice in rural areas should be developed, reflecting the need to give due credence to the rural in contemporary socio-legal scholarship.

The right to the exclusive services of sports performers is a valuable asset, in team sports, to the clubs which employ them and, in individual sports, to the agents, managers and/or promoters who act for them. This is most visible in professional football's market for players’ services where leading performers are currently ‘sold’ for many millions of pounds. The notion of players as assets is often reflected in clubs’ accounts and enhances clubs’ overall value. Of those clubs which are owned by publicly quoted companies the securing (or loss) of a star player can crucially affect the share price of the controlling company. In a more general sense a player's value to his club is reflected in his capacity to attract larger attendances, an increased volume of pre-season ticket sales and enhanced merchandising and marketing opportunities.

The business case for corporate environmental responsibility is the claim that behaving responsibly makes financial sense. It is impossible to exaggerate the contemporary significance of this claim, not least in legitimising environmental concerns in the corporate sphere. However, the business case is not without significant empirical and normative limitations, as is illustrated by the corporate environmental problem of supermarket waste. This paper evaluates enlightened shareholder value under s 172 of the Companies Act 2006 in light of such business case limitations. It suggests that s 172, by procedurally mandating the business case for corporate environmental responsibility, is a retrograde step which envisions not enlightened, but rather environmentally unenlightened, shareholders.

The government has made a commitment to ensure that sustainable development is placed at the heart of decision-making. The UK's strategy has primarily involved the development of voluntary measures to achieve sustainable development in policy-making. These measures are monitored by a Sustainable Development Commission and, most importantly, a parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee. However, a number of public bodies also have a statutory duty in respect of sustainable development. These duties do not create enforceable legal obligations, but may have significant value as a clear statement of policy on the achievement of sustainable development – providing political leadership at the highest level. It is essential to this aim that the government provides a clear message regarding the objective of sustainable development. However, close investigation of these duties reveals not only a partial legal framework, but a number of inconsistencies in the government's approach to the achievement of sustainable development.

The pressure to distinguish high quality from lower quality law journals is intensifying. To contribute to this debate, citation-based and peer review-based ranking of law journals are paralleled in the paper, using qualitative and quantitative analysis. It is found that all law journals that are considered as journals of the highest quality by legal experts are also ranked highly in Web of Science (WoS) and that 40% of the law journals categorised as ‘internationally leading’ by the peers are not listed in WoS. This paper explores what the editors of some of the internationally leading law journals that are not listed in the WoS think about applying to be listed in it. The paper offers data to support the contention that legal scholarship is characterised by regionalism in academic publishing and citation patterns. It is submitted that there is no perfect indicator of quality, and that no evaluation system will ever convince every legal scholar in the world of its value. WoS could be adopted as a rigorous and internationally recognised index for law journals only if it were aligned more closely with the Leiden Manifesto.

The substance of this article revolves around Kenny's rhetorical question. It is a widely held view among lawyers and legal philosophers that the idea of criminal justice involves the presupposition of the freedom of the will, but there are good grounds for accepting some version of determinism as a working hypothesis to explain criminal behaviour. Judges themselves on occasion do this. Unless it can be shown, therefore, that determinism is either compatible with free will, or is itself an incoherent doctrine, the whole rationale of the criminal law as a form of social control stands exposed to criticism.

I am going to attack a particular type of undergraduate Criminal Law course. I do not have in mind any particular course currently taught. I do not assume that it is the textbooks which provide the model from which courses proceed. The sort ofcourse upon which I want to make an attack has many features, amongst which the following are to be found:

In January 1995, during the furore over the murder conviction of Private Lee Clegg, the Home Office announced a review of the law of murder as the House of Lords had declared it to be. In March 1996 the Report of the Inter-Departmental Review of the Law on the Use of Lethal Force in Self-Defence or the Prevention of Crime was completed and, if not exactly ‘published’, then at least available to interested members of the public. The review was primarily concerned with the possibility of enacting a partial defence to murder, whereby a soldier or policemen who had used excessive force resulting in the death of a criminal suspect would be convicted only of manslaughter, but the Home Office also examined the possibility of giving statutory authority to the internal Army and police regulations upon the use of firearms, in order to clarify the concept of ‘reasonable force’. In the end, however, the Inter-Departmental Review (hereafter ‘the Review’) proposed no change to the law of murder nor of voluntary manslaughter, and neither did it propose any method of clarifying the concept of ‘reasonable force’.

The work of carers is too often unvalued and unrecognised. This paper seeks to demonstrate some of the ways in which law and traditional medical ethics overlook the interests of carers and the importance of their work. It argues that this is, in part, due to the individualistic ethic that has come to dominate legal and ethical discourse about medicine. It recommends an approach based on an ethic of care that seeks to promote and protect just relationships of care, rather than an individualised model of rights.

This paper examines the interplay between discourses of exclusion and inclusion in the relationship between land law and human rights. It explores the common law conception of property in land and its relationship with the conceptual structure of property before suggesting that the particular form the conception takes in the English common law is problematic as a discourse of exclusion in the light of inclusive human rights considerations. However, further submerged exclusions in law are also explored, suggesting a problematic ideological continuity between land law and human rights law, notwithstanding identifiable surface tensions between them as contrasting discourses. Once the continuity of hidden exclusions is identified, the paper explores the theoretical unity between the deep structure of property as ‘propriety’ and human rights as ‘what is due’, and suggests their mutual potential for embracing more inclusive concerns. Finally, two modest proposals for future theoretical reform are offered: the need for a more anthropologically adequate and inclusive construct of the human being as legal actor, and the need for a more differentiated, context-sensitive formulation of the common law1 property conception, one capable of reconciling conceptually necessary elements of excludability with inclusive human rights impulses.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and UN Human Rights Committee have reached contradictory decisions in cases concerning the right to manifest religion. This discrepancy calls into question the universality of the right and is problematic from the perspective of legal certainty. Consequently, this article explores the extent to which the diverging decisions of these two bodies are compatible with a good faith interpretation of the right to manifest religion. A good faith interpretation of the right is identified by utilising the travaux préparatoires and subsequent interpretations. It is argued that by failing to scrutinise the necessity of restrictions and the role of secularism, the ECtHR has undermined this good faith interpretation and, in so doing, is not fulfilling its role as ‘the conscience of Europe’.

The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice state that there should be ‘a close relationship between the notion of responsibility for delinquent or criminal behaviour and other social rights and responsibilities’. If healthcare autonomy, or the ‘right to be responsible for making decisions about our own medical welfare’, is accepted as one of these social rights then, in England, the age gap between criminal responsibility and healthcare right is considerable. It has been suggested that this age difference might be explained in terms of the attribution of responsibility; in essence that there is a difference in the timing and nature of the responsibility being ascribed. The aim of this paper is to examine the concept of responsibility, particularly as it relates to adolescent decisions concerning death; the refusal of life-saving treatment, on the one hand, and the commission of homicidal acts, on the other. It would appear that there is considerable overlap in the types of responsibility alluded to in both situations, most particularly in the notions of capacity responsibility and prospective responsibility. If this is so, then having a wide gap between the two ages of responsibility would seem to lack a secure jurisprudential basis.

In this essay I consider the reception, perception and construction of deaths by disaster. Catastrophies such as those at Aberfan, Zeebrugge and Hillsborough present a challenge to legal and political systems. They prompt immediate and long-term responses. Some of these are concerned with establishing the cause, some with preventing their recurrence and others with blame allocation. There have been public and not so public inquiries into them. In some cases there have been criminal prosecutions with suggestions of scapegoating, but all these disasters have one thing in common. They have been the subject of an inquest. To be more precise, each death has been the subject of an inquest, as are the 18,000 deaths from external causes, injuries or poisoning, which occur every year. Here I focus in particular on the role of the coroner's inquest and its relationship with other forms of public investigation in shaping public perceptions of disasters.

In Bland the House of Lords held it lawful to withdraw tube-feeding from a patient in a ‘persistent vegetative state’ (pvs), even with intent to kill him. The British Medical Association (BMA) recently published guidance on the withholding and withdrawal of ‘medical treatment’, so defined as to include food and water delivered by tube. The guidance endorses the withholding/withdrawal of tube-delivered food and water not only from patients in pvs but also from other non-terminally ill patients, such as those with severe dementia or serious stroke. The underlying justification appears (as in Bland) to be that such lives lack worth. This article offers three major criticisms of the guidance. First, its argument that tube-feeding is medical treatment rather than basic care is weak. Secondly, its reasons for not treating or tube-feeding undermine the BMA's longstanding opposition to active euthanasia and active assisted suicide. Thirdly, it relies heavily on legal precedent at the expense of ethical reasoning.

Rankings of law schools and law journals are part of a trend towards more emphasis in academia on transparency and accountability with regard to the quality of research and education. Globalisation increases the need to compare law schools and law journals across borders, but this raises complicated questions due to differences in language, education systems, publishing style and so on. In this contribution, it is argued that ranking of law schools and law reviews runs the risk of driving us away from quality based on substance towards proceduralisation and quality assessment based on proxies favoured by managers of law schools, funding bodies and government agencies, instead of by the forum of legal scholars.