This paper is concerned with how law organises and controls space. It offers a new history of enclosure in the context of early English colonialism. By drawing this connection, the paper opens up new lines of enquiry into how law organises and produces space at both the domestic and international scale.

8% of UK students have an ‘unseen disability’: a specific learning difficulty, autistic spectrum condition, or mental ill health. A department with 1000 students has, on average, 80 students with such unseen disabilities. These students have a variety of potential sources of legal redress if they consider a university has failed properly to accommodate their disability. The most plausible is a claim under the Equality Act 2010. We have experienced a lack of clarity in understanding the nature and extent of those Equality Act entitlements, and the corresponding obligations that fall upon universities, and their staff. These confusions occur in many contexts, but the one that is most important to students is their entitlements where assessments are concerned. We set out to explain the relevant law, and to consider how it applies to some, perhaps typical, unseen disabilities in the context of a range of approaches taken by universities in assessing their students. Our principal and important conclusion is that there is no ‘quick fix’ approach according to which someone may say that they are Equality Act compliant. However, there are several considerations which will increase (or decrease) the likelihood of compliance. In brief, these constitute: effective communication; procedures that secure individual decisions, rather than blanket policies or approaches; and what amounts to no more than good inclusive educational practice for all students.

It is now well recognised that contractual purposes play an important role in the construction of contracts. The methods by which purposes are taken into account have not, however, been systematically explored. This paper considers three central issues in the purposive construction of contracts: first, the reasons contractual purposes are relevant to the interpretation of express terms and the identification of implied terms; secondly, the way in which contractual purposes are identified and distinguished from individual party interests; and, thirdly, the different ways in which contractual purposes inform the processes of interpretation and implication. It is argued that reference to contractual purposes can both raise and resolve interpretive choices, and that purposive construction plays a significant and under-recognised role in the identification of implied terms.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission was created in 2006 with wide-ranging powers to protect human rights, promote equal opportunities and encourage mutual respect between different groups. Alongside the Commission, individuals through the courts, and sector-specific enforcers (such as ombudsmen and regulators) have also been given equality and human rights enforcement powers. Within this enforcement landscape, the Commission has struggled to craft an enforcement role for itself. For the first time, this paper, through the mapping of these different actors in their shared regulatory space, outlines a role for the Commission in equality and human rights enforcement. This role consists of three primary tasks: (i) taking action that courts and sector-specific enforcers are unable to perform; (ii) overcoming some of the limitations of private enforcement in the courts; and (iii) coordinating and supporting sector-specific enforcers. The paper concludes by exploring how the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) can effectively fulfil this role.

Laypeople are often deterred from undertaking altruistic acts, assuming that they face a risk of negligence liability should they injure others while helping. We argue that the laypeople's interpretation of the law does not correspond with the courts’ interpretation of negligence liability. Reviewing the case law, we demonstrate that the courts treat such cases with leniency in the spirit of the Compensation Act 2006, s 1 and the Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Act (SARAH) 2015, s 2. Thus, the negligence liability rules do not offer a sufficient explanation for the widely-held opinion that acts of altruism may give rise to liability. We hypothesise that the public's perception of legal rules is determined by a number of well-known biases and is not founded in the law itself. In the light of those biases, we contend that the function of the Compensation Act 2006, s 1 and SARAH 2015 does not lie in the substance but in their value as potential signals to reassure laypeople.

The Rana Plaza disaster of April 2013 was the most prominent of several incidents that have highlighted poor standards of business behaviour in the supply chains of well-known brands. Analysis of these incidents has attributed these poor standards to an institutional structure in which lead firms with strategic power outsource production into global value chains and pursue business models that involve rapid product upgrading and require low costs and fast turnarounds in production such as the garment industry's ‘fast fashion’ business model. This paper aims to complement that analysis by showing how trade marks, as the main legal anchors of brands, have reinforced the strategic power of lead firms, enabled them to outsource production and encouraged them to adopt business models of this kind. The paper will also evaluate the claim that brands mitigate their harmful effects by transmitting countervailing pressure back onto their owners because they provide salient targets for bad publicity and blame, as coverage of the Rana Plaza disaster showed, which can threaten their owners with reputational damage. It will be argued that this countervailing pressure has a limited effect and cannot be relied on without more to address the issues that the Rana Plaza disaster revealed.

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 high prevalence of tobacco smoking in prison, and certain aspects inherent in prison culture make smoking in that environment particularly difficult to regulate. Over the last decade, the UK government has adopted and sought to implement gradually its plan to make all prisons smoke-free nationwide. The UK Supreme Court recently ruled in Black that the Health Act 2006, which prohibits smoking in most enclosed public spaces, does not bind the Crown and consequently does not apply to public prisons. Both developments have implications for the human rights protection of smoking and non-smoking prisoners. This paper considers how English smoking and non-smoking prisoners’ (human) rights are currently protected, and what the legal implications are of a complete ban on smoking in English prisons. The paper reflects on whether an indoor smoking ban might strike a better balance between the competing rights and interests of smoking and non-smoking prisoners than a complete ban.

The norm in fitness to practise proceedings (FTPP) is that where sanctions might be imposed procedural fairness requires a court-like hearing. This paper questions that paradigm, using empirical research to focus on the FTPP to which social workers must account. Procedural fairness is a multi-faceted legitimising concept used to justify the design of decision-making processes. With FTPPs, the major justification is an ‘instrumentally’ focused model of procedural fairness which prioritises making decisions that look right, a goal which is delivered in the context of social work. But other justifications for procedural fairness are inadequately fulfilled, with in particular a ‘dignitarian’ respect not achieved due to the high levels of non-attendance by registrant social workers. Further, procedural fairness as ‘public accountability’ is undermined due to the relative lack of engagement of FTPPs with the perspective of the social work community. These findings hint that in the context of a poorly organised and resource-poor profession other hybrid forms of FTPP might have a stronger claim to procedural fairness than the court-like model.