In the post-Brexit world it is generally considered that parliamentary sovereignty is the ultimate Grundnorm of the English/United Kingdom sovereignty. The author contends that this truism is largely borne out by recent decisions of the UK Supreme Court in a series of major constitutional cases (Gina Miller (No 2), Privacy International, Scottish Independence Bill and Re Allister and Peeple’s Application). Yet two of these decision (Gina Miller (No 2) and Privacy International) show that the position is slightly more nuanced than this. The latter case shows that the UK courts will not give effect in practice to legislation which ousts the general judicial review power of the High Court. It is also possible that Gina Miller (No 2) will over time lay the foundation for a new Grundnorm whereby the UK courts can review executive decisions on the ground that they are inconsistent with a higher norm of fundamental democratic principles. By contrast, the Irish example shows in one way how far Ireland has travelled from its original common law constitutional roots. The existence of a Kelsenian-style written constitution with a defined hierarchy of norms and system and an express system of judicial review of legislation has over time produced very different methods of judicial thinking and reasoning, so that popular – and not parliamentary – sovereignty view of the referendum process is now the ultimate Grundnorm in the Irish constitutional system.

Despite the exponential rise in the number of couples cohabiting, across Europe, cohabitants are unable to access comprehensive legal protections. To strengthen calls for reform, this paper advocates for the adoption of a human rights framing and traces its potential development. It begins with an analysis of the current discourse and offers an explanation as to why there is limited engagement with human rights argumentation. The focus will then shift to the need for a human rights framing. Through an analysis of the merits of such, it will be demonstrated that the common criticisms of a human rights framing are not applicable in the cohabitation context. Moreover, it will be argued that, owing to a previous judicial recognition of human rights infringements, the debate is primed for the adoption of a novel framing. This paper will conclude by considering how a human rights framing could be applied in practice.

On 31 August 2024, tickets for the Oasis reunion tour went on sale. The outcome was predictable. Prospective purchasers waited online for hours to buy tickets, many were disappointed. Tickets soon appeared on secondary sites at prices which greatly exceeded originally advertised prices. The resulting outcries fed into the new Government’s manifesto promise to ‘put fans back at the heart of events by introducing new consumer protections on ticket resales’. The best solutions to address the popular concerns are: (1) to improve the allocation of tickets in the primary market; and (2) add a greater degree of consumer protection to reduce information asymmetry in the primary market. The former reform requires no regulatory intervention. As a second-best solution I suggest rethinking regulation of the secondary market, as most of the current and proposed regulatory efforts in this market are either unworkable or exacerbate fan frustration. Regulatory interventions on basis of ‘fairness’ or ‘putting fans first’ exacerbate these market failures. The source of the problem is market failure in the primary market, and it is towards this that regulatory effort should be directed. Intervention in the form of secondary market price caps will undermine efforts to protect fans.

This paper critically examines the legal and normative implications of remote AI weapons detection (AWD) systems currently under trial in England and Wales. Positioned as a technological solution to rising knife crime and counter-terrorism challenges, these systems claim to reduce reliance on traditional stop and search practices by identifying concealed weapons without physical contact. We make an original argument that such technologies invert the established logic of stop and search – effectively transforming it into a new concept of ‘search and stop’ – with significant consequences for individual rights and police accountability. Through a doctrinal analysis of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), relevant case law from the European Court of Human Rights and England and Wales, and the directed surveillance regime under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the paper addresses five core questions: (1) whether AI-generated outputs can satisfy the legal standard of ‘reasonable suspicion’; (2) whether remote scanning constitutes a ‘search’ in law; (3) the implications of these systems under equality law and police duties under PACE; (4) how the technology engages surveillance law and the right to privacy; and (5) what reforms or safeguards are needed for lawful and legitimate use.

Orthodox accounts of negligence liability for ‘pure psychiatric damage’ view it as protecting the claimants’ interest in their psychiatric health and often attack English law’s restrictive duty of care rules for inadequately safeguarding this right. This paper challenges this widespread consensus by presenting and evaluating an alternative explanatory rationale. Drawing an analogy between the ‘paradigm case’ of primary victims and the tort of assault, the crux of the argument is that the interest protected in ‘accident’ cases is in avoiding anticipated immediate physical violence but the law sometimes extends the protection of this right to secondary victims in order to preserve the law’s legitimacy. From this perspective, several intractable doctrinal problems that have long troubled adherents to the orthodox view become explicable.

Prevailing wisdom suggests that sentencing guidelines may constrain judicial discretion and hinder individualised justice; however, our cross-jurisdictional analysis indicates that they might actually better protect these principles than unrestricted discretion. Utilising two large-scale datasets from England and Wales, and Hong Kong, we examine sentences for burglary, assault, and drug trafficking. The results reveal a paradox: guidelines in England and Wales contributed to greater consistency in retributive proportionality and enhanced consideration of personal mitigating factors. Conversely, Hong Kong’s discretionary approach resulted in inconsistent application of sentencing considerations and personal mitigating factors. Both systems prioritised procedural efficiency, with guilty pleas markedly reducing sentences across various offences. These findings challenge the ‘bias effect’ critique by demonstrating that well-structured guidelines can safeguard individualised justice better than unfettered discretion can. The study offers robust empirical evidence for institutional design in criminal justice systems.

Under English law, adoption permanently severs a child’s legal ties with their birth family, raising concerns about identity that sit uneasily with Islamic legal principles emphasising the preservation of lineage. These tensions are particularly acute for Muslim children, who are overrepresented in the English care system yet underrepresented in adoption. This paper argues that the resulting disparity derives in part from the tolerance of secrecy surrounding a child’s origins within English adoption law. Addressing the source of these tensions, the paper challenges the widespread assumption that adoption is prohibited in Islamic law. It examines recent legislative and judicial developments in Muslim-majority states that facilitate adoption-like arrangements while safeguarding children’s identity rights, highlighting that secrecy is the main source of religious concern. Against the policy context created by the 2022 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and its call for a ‘radical reset’, the paper identifies secrecy within English adoption practice as a continuing barrier to legitimacy and permanence, and proposes a clear policy requiring early disclosure of adoptive status, before age seven and with local authority support, to strengthen children’s identity rights and permanence outcomes across the care system.

The enforcement priorities set by competition authorities carry significant socio-economic consequences: their decisions affect market structures, determine what constitutes legitimate business conduct, and influence how economic power and welfare are distributed. Yet, in most jurisdictions, priority-setting remains a largely reactive, insulated process, guided by a narrowly defined consumer welfare standard and disconnected from wider social, economic, and democratic concerns. Consequently, the benefits of enforcement, such as correcting market failures or enhancing consumer savings, are often unevenly distributed among members of society, and without specific accountability to the broader public. This issue is particularly pressing today, in a turbulent world shaped by geopolitics, geoeconomics, the politicisation of competition law and regulation, and growing pressure to deliver rapid and efficient results. By relying on insights from the theory of responsive regulation, social accountability of independent regulatory authorities, and deliberative and participatory governance models, the paper investigates how priority-setting can be theoretically rethought and practically restructured to be more responsive, strategic, and socially accountable to broader concerns. Our proposed approach remains within the scope of competition authorities’ administrative discretion and does not entail changes to the current substantive, procedural, or institutional frameworks.

This paper offers a novel conceptual framework for understanding fraud in the digital era by introducing the idea of industrialised fraud. Unlike existing literature that focuses on the mechanics of cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent fraud, this work situates fraud within the social, structural, technological and economic transformations of the digitalised economy. It argues that fraud is no longer an outlier but a systemic feature of unregulated digital markets, operating at scale and across borders. Through the analytical lenses of fraud’s footholds and fraud’s lifecycles, the paper reexamines fraud’s core legal and moral norms – means, purposes and fault. It demonstrates how they are being reshaped by the transactional contexts in which fraud is now designed, facilitated and perpetrated. This reconceptualisation provides a firmer foundation for principled debate on fraud governance and criminalisation in an era of rapid technological transformation.

Why do states under-expend? Conventional explanations point to institutional failures. By contrast, drawing on the case of cesses in Indian tax history and practice, I take underspending not only as symptomatic of flaws in state administration, but also as constitutive of state forms. In this specific case, I argue that the underspending of earmarked funds, and their consequent pooling and remobilisation, produce a bifurcated state through its revenue arrangements. This argument is of substantive value, but it is also in the service of a broader conceptual move: reinterpreting something that might conventionally be understood as a marker of state failure or dysfunction, as in fact constitutive of the state. Finally, the argument also has a methodological dimension. In order to execute this redescription, I draw on a mix of archival material and analysis of case law. This extends an insight from tax law scholarship on the importance of a multi-disciplinary methodological apparatus to bring tax and constitutional scholarship together.

The study is one of the first in its field to be grounded in extensive, original qualitative data on the lived experiences of senior managers in financial firms. Its principal aim is to construct a comprehensive, empirically-based typology of culture in finance, drawing on findings from 29 semi-structured interviews with current and former senior managers in UK financial firms and regulatory personnel. The study employs a rigorous participant selection and thematic analysis process that reflects the diverse array of financial firms, sectors, roles and perspectives on culture. It does so by applying appropriate theoretical frameworks on organisational culture to unearth the nuances and typology of culture in the UK finance industry. Our findings indicate that financial firms are in a state of transition between two distinct types of culture, from an old and heavily criticised archetype (which still holds sway) towards a not yet fully realised vision of a new transformed culture. Beyond its theoretical interest, our analysis reveals ways to improve culture in finance and provides recommendations for the development of financial regulation and broader policymaking, aiming for a whole-hearted shift from principles-based regulation to outcomes-based regulation.

This paper explores the interplay between intellectual property and gender in modern design law and practice, with a focus on the New Zealand Designs Act 1953 and references to Australian, United Kingdom and European Union law. It highlights how law and practice favour technical, utilitarian design principles (that coded masculine), but neglect the dynamic, sensory and affective (embodied and emotive) aspects of designs (that coded feminine). Through its focus on the technical, design law and practice ignore the socio-legal reality that the dynamic, sensory and affective are often central to a design’s success. The paper frames the foregoing in standpoint theory and affect. It challenges the focus on that which can be reduced to technical-based representation and the perception that this creates an objective master copy. The paper calls for a reassessment of what design law protects and how it protects it, to better align the system with the socio-legal realities of design creation and use.

The public local inquiry in the planning system is expected to facilitate public participation in environmental decision-making. Public participation in environmental decision-making has the aim of enhancing environmental democracy, making better decisions and improving environmental protection. This paper argues that, despite the long history of participation in the planning system, public local inquiries in their present state are limited in their capacity to facilitate public participation. It contends that the public participation responsibilities of the public local inquiry are hampered by its adversarial procedures. Planning scholars have argued that the formal, adversarial nature of the public local inquiry makes it difficult for people with little legal experience to participate, thus acting as an obstacle to public participation and good decision-making. Drawing on inquiry case law and scholarship, this paper investigates the multiple purposes of the inquiry and how tensions between these purposes have been interpreted by the courts. In exploring the reasons for these conflicts, the paper provides an opportunity to refine the system to facilitate public participation and to ensure that the public local inquiry is fair to its participants and serves the democratic purpose it is expected to meet.

Large grant-making philanthropic foundations in the UK and the EU can have a significant influence over environmental law and as such are worthy of more attention from environmental law scholars. Through analysis of publicly available documents, we identify in this paper an absence of consistent transparency by these foundations. This makes their influence hard to understand, hard to research, hard even to see at work in the world. Transparency is complex and challenging, however. And so, rather than berating problematic approaches, we explore through interviews with actors in the field, as well as the academic literature, both the difficulties that foundations experience in pursuing transparent practices and the benefits of transparency. We conclude by identifying some principles for improved visibility of foundation work.

Despite the Supreme Court ruling on the matter in July 2023, the correct test for police misconduct for use of force (the use of force test) in England and Wales remains contested. This paper explores how the largely subjective criminal law test preferred by police stakeholders is inconsistent with addressing the institutional racism within the Metropolitan Police highlighted in the Casey Review. In doing so, it makes a novel contribution to police accountability debates by developing a new analytical framework which allows arguments concerning police accountability processes to be more clearly articulated and assessed. The framework envisages three axes of accountability. The conduct axis relates to the actual levels of force used against citizens. The cultural axis concerns the extent to which police accountability processes provide meaningful oversight of police managers and professional standards departments, while the constitutional axis is engaged with the balance of power at the various parts of the police accountability system. Plotting the relative impact of more subjective or objective use of force tests along each axis allows clarity of debate concerning the consequences of the preferred test and thereby highlights the mitigation necessary in relation to the negative consequences of a choice in either direction.

This paper examines the effect of post-Brexit UK trade agreements on devolved regulatory autonomy. It does so by: (i) carrying out a comprehensive mapping exercise of the overlaps between such agreements and devolved matters; (ii) analysing the domestic legal framework for the implementation of international trade commitments in devolved law; and (iii) identifying the extent to which trade agreements have affected devolved competences and/or caused substantive changes to devolved legislation. The paper demonstrates that UK trade agreements have rarely resulted in significant changes to devolved legislation. This outcome is attributable not only to the limited regulatory ambition of the agreements concluded so far, but also to the distinctive role played by UK domestic implementing legislation in shaping the scope of devolved autonomy. In particular, it shows how the interaction between international trade commitments and the UK’s implementation framework operates as a ‘double bind’ on devolved autonomy.

The application of a contract involves ascertaining whether the components of a contract term are met on the facts. It is a matter of categorisation or classification. There are at least three methods of categorisation: by criteria; by factor-balancing; and by analogy. The process of application is distinct from the processes that are engaged to define contract terms, including in particular interpretation. However, both the process of application and the process of interpretation address problems of linguistic indeterminacy, that is, cases where the words do not fit the facts. And these problems are usually resolved through interpretation; the relevant term is defined with such specificity that it is clear how it is to be applied. It is only when the court cannot define the term precisely that the court engages in categorisation or classification in a complex and meaningful way.

Constitutional theory remains obsessed with high-profile constitutional decision-makers, but front-end constitutional actors that provide key support and advice to decision-makers also help protect and defend constitutions. This paper profiles a group of front-end constitutional actors that I call ‘the influencers’, which is composed of: statutory drafters, permanent secretaries, government lawyers, and house officials. After detailing the roles and responsibilities of these actors, I then look at how they influence frontline decision-makers. Next, I examine the perspectives, values, and mentalities that the influencers operate on, all of which are key to further understanding these constitutional actors. This exploration into the influencers contains significant implications for the UK constitution, such as: disregarding influencer advice can often boil over; back-end constitutional actors are not the sole preservers of the rule of law; and front-end actors may help fill a decisive scrutiny gap regarding legislation. The influencers also contain implications for constitutional theory, in that they challenge some typical narratives found in constitutional scholarship, and they can also significantly impact constitutional success (or failure). Ultimately, deeper insight into the influencers can help us understand how to better protect and defend constitutions on the front-end.

User interfaces – on the web, standalone apps, or internal systems – are now central to the design and operation of the welfare state, with profound implications for access to legal entitlements and the exercise of administrative discretion. While socio-legal scholars have begun to examine how interfaces mediate state-citizen relations, research has been constrained by limited access to these systems. This paper applies a novel socio-legal methodology to analyse prototypes developed by software engineers working in the UK’s welfare administration by drawing on the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) GitHub account – a platform where the DWP’s digital team stores, manages, and shares code on an almost daily basis across more than 500 repositories. By analysing this code, this paper moves beyond the handful of public-facing examples that have dominated scholarship to date to present a new account of how digital interfaces mediate access to legal entitlements. The analysis reveals three interlinking patterns: (i) ‘happy path’ processing that assumes ideal user journeys; (ii) prompting and priming mechanisms that shape decision-making; and (iii) interfaces designed specifically for official workforce management and control. This paper argues that these findings have significant implications for socio-legal analyses of public services and administrative justice in digital contexts.

This paper assesses the effectiveness of current legal standards in resolving rights-based disputes arising from compulsory curricula in schools, an issue of growing significance as such teaching expands in the areas of sexuality, relationship and religious education. Focusing on Article 2 of Protocol 1 (P1-2) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), it critiques the current reliance on the ‘objective, critical, and pluralistic’ (OCP) standard, examining its alignment with the core purpose of P1-2: preventing state monopolisation in education through safeguarding qualified parental choice. The analysis identifies shortcomings in P1-2 case law, particularly the subjective nature of determining when teaching is OCP, the negation of parental objections and the neglect of children’s rights in the assessment process. To address these issues, the paper proposes a revised review framework which prioritises a justification test that recognises parental concerns, reduces reliance on public interest justifications and acknowledges the legitimacy of children’s rights as grounds for limiting parental objections. The paper argues that this refined approach better aligns with the article’s foundational purpose whilst fostering an enlarged space for the balanced consideration of competing interests and rights in educational controversies.