Comparing UK and Irish law: A special relationship?

By Prof Paula Giliker, Professor of Comparative Law (University of Bristol Law School) and former President of the British Association of Comparative Law.

The British Association of Comparative Law (BACL) held its annual seminar, jointly with the Irish Society of Comparative Law, at University College, Dublin on 5 September 2017. The joint seminar was chaired and organised by Professor Paula Giliker. To celebrate BACL’s first annual seminar in Ireland, the seminar reflected on the relationship between UK and Irish law in the fields of land law, banking regulation, language legislation and consumer law.  The seminar was sponsored by publishers, Intersentia.

The seminar sought to examine different features of the relationship between Irish and UK law: the tensions of the past, the similar problems faced by two common law jurisdictions in the light of a global banking crisis, linguistic diversity and demands for consumer law reform and the future, with one jurisdiction remaining within the European Union and the other deciding to leave.  (more…)

Celebrating the life and work of Professor Bernard Rudden (1933-2015): BACL Annual Seminar 2016

By Prof Paula Giliker, Professor of Comparative Law (University of Bristol Law School) and President of the British Association of Comparative Law.

ruddenProfessor Bernard Rudden DCL, LLD, FBA was Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford from 1979-1999 and Professorial Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.  On 6 September 2016, the British Association of Comparative Law (BACL) held its annual seminar in his honour at St. Catherine’s College Oxford.  Its theme was: ‘Bernard Rudden – Comparativist, Legal Scholar, Polymath’.

Professor Rudden, a noted comparative private lawyer, passed away on 4 March 2015, aged 81. His obituary in The Times newspaper described him as a “legal polymath who published extensively on Soviet law”, but the seminar sought to go beyond this succinct description and identify not only Rudden’s contribution to comparative law scholarship but also his impact as a friend, colleague, teacher of law and mentor to numerous comparative law academics. (more…)