The Mental Capacity Act 2005 introduced a statutory framework for advance decisions, thus promoting autonomous healthcare decision making in advance of loss of capacity. In order to be valid and applicable, and so binding on healthcare professionals, advance decisions refusing treatment (ADRT) must specify treatments to be refused and the circumstances of refusal. Recent case-law indicates that a high level of specificity is required for advance refusals of life-sustaining treatment and, in contrast to a presumption of capacity for contemporaneous decisions, in some circumstances capacity must be demonstrated at the time of making the advance decision. In comparison with the ‘stringent’ requirements for ADRT, the more generic Advance Care Planning (ACP) is gaining more prominence in end of life decision making. The paper explores recent case-law and its impact on the effectiveness of ADRT in practice and compares with ACP.

Four of the better-known unfair dismissal cases involve dismissals of employees for behaviour outside work. All four of those dismissals were held to be ‘fair’. This paper looks afresh at the subject matter of dismissals for behaviour outside work. It will argue, first, that employment tribunals should apply a separate framework to dismissals for behaviour outside work and not just apply the normal framework that is designed for dismissals for behaviour at work. Secondly, the paper will construct this separate framework to apply to dismissals for extramural behaviour. It will be argued that there should henceforth be a presumption that dismissals for behaviour outside work will be unfair unless the employer has a strong reason for thinking that the extramural behaviour of the employee will damage the business of the employer. The purpose of this paper is to suggest legal reasons for change to this area of unfair dismissal law as an addition to previously discussed normative reasons for change. In particular, the paper will develop the analogy between unfair dismissal cases on behaviour outside work and breach of personal confidence cases since the Human Rights Act 1998.

In the Statute of Westminster II (1285) c. 34, it was enacted that a widow could lose her action of dower, and the possibility of claiming the usual proportion of her deceased husband's real property, if, while he was alive, she had left him for a lover, and the married couple had not been reconciled during the husband's life. This new exception to the action of dower represented an important change in the balance between a widow and her husband's heir, or others with an interest in lands she might claim as her dower, and is therefore of great significance to the history of women, law and property in the common law world. The exception remained part of the law of England until dower itself was abolished in 1925, but, although the early years of the exception have been explored, its later history is less well known. As this paper will show, there was a slow and contested move away from the early literal and relatively ‘widow-friendly’ interpretation of c. 34 to a purposive, more moralising and much more ‘widow-unfriendly’ view, influenced by the opinion of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), and encouraged by a number of other legal and social factors.

Cuts in the Charity Commission's budget have caused it to retrench in its regulatory activity and re-prioritise its core functions. As a consequence, the Commission has promoted greater trustee self-reliance and charity-sector provision of regulatory services. This paper analyses these regulatory developments alongside a broader analysis of self-regulation in the charity sector. This paper argues that while self-reliance and self-regulation offer opportunities to the charity sector to create nuanced, sector-sensitive regulation, they could also compromise the credibility and quality of charity regulation. This paper further argues that the charity sector needs to address as a matter of priority the drivers for regulatory reform, the purposes and priority of charity regulation, and the shift in the balance of power that results.

The need for courts and the judiciary to operate in public and for their activities to be open to public scrutiny is a well-established goal of liberal democracies. One of its recent policy manifestations is in debates about confidence in the justice system and initiatives designed to improve confidence. In the majority of cases, public scrutiny of court and judicial activity relies upon the media. Reports in regional and national newspapers have long been – and research suggests continue to be – an important source of information, shaping public knowledge and facilitating public scrutiny of the justice system. Unlike in some other common law jurisdictions, in the UK there is almost no scholarship on these representations, past or present. The result is that little is known about the representation of courts and the judiciary in Press reports. The aim of this paper is to take a first step towards changing that state of affairs. It uses a data set made up of 205 contemporary newspaper reports of court and judicial activity. These come from a sample of 24 daily newspapers: 10 national newspapers and 14 from the regions. All were published on Thursday 16 February 2012, an unexceptional day in the life of the justice system and the Press. The modest goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of this snapshot of the courts and the judiciary in the Press in England and Wales.

In this paper, to paraphrase Scheper-Hughes, we explore the contested legalities and illegalities of medical tourism. Increasingly, individuals are travelling outside of their home jurisdiction to access health services. This may be for a range of reasons: for speed, for cheapness or in some cases to bypass criminal restrictions at state level. This paper explores those who fall into the latter category and who travel to avoid statutory or regulatory prohibitions in relation to certain clinical procedures in England and Wales. In this paper, we consider the appropriate legal response to illicit transplant tourism. We examine the legitimacy of using extra-territorial jurisdiction to enforce the ban on the commercial trade in organs found in the Human Tissue Act 2004. We suggest that this, along with the recent Draft Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking in Human Organs, provide an effective response to the transnational crime of illicit organ tourism.

Universities have increasingly become aware of the fact that the intellectual property (IP) rights that attach to the work of their academics could become significant and valuable assets to the university as an institution and economic organisation. The study involved analysis of the copyright and intellectual property policies of universities in the UK and the interviewing of specialised representatives of universities in relation to the policies of their respective institutions. The principal question of the study was the way in which university policies deal with the issue of ownership of copyright generated by academic staff, which proved to be a sensitive area. University policies presume that, by default, they own all work that academics create as their employees. There seems to be insufficient appreciation of the differentiated legal interpretation of the employees' copyright rule. At least in relation to core academic work (scholarly books and journal articles in particular), initial copyright ownership by the university, by virtue of the statutory employee-copyright rule, is highly doubtful. As a result of the universities' principal position with regard to ownership, university IP policies have resorted to complicated and artificial assignment and licencing provisions, with questionable enforceability.