Litigants In Person and Financial Remedies on Divorce

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by the ‘Fair Shares’ Project Team: Emma Hitchings, Caroline Bryson, Gillian Douglas, Susan Purdon and Jenny Birchall

We know that a relatively small proportion (only around one-third) of divorcing couples goes to court to get any kind of order dealing with their financial arrangements, and of those, most will arrive with an agreed settlement that they want turned into a binding ‘consent order’ rather than have the judge decide for them. Even consent orders are subject to scrutiny by the court to ensure that their terms are fair and not contrary to public policy, but while this scrutiny should be more than a rubber stamp, the court is not ‘some kind of forensic ferret’, as Waite LJ put it in Pounds v Pounds ([1994] 1 FLR 775), burrowing into the minutiae of what the parties have agreed and querying every detail. Of course, where the couple haven’t reached a settlement and the judge has to decide the outcome of their case, he or she will have to look in depth at the parties’ circumstances and reach a decision based on the law set out in the relevant legislation and case law. (more…)

What are the main governance opportunities and challenges for procurement digitalisation?

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by Professor Albert Sanchez-Graells, University of Bristol Law School.

Approximately a third of public sector spending goes to procure third-party goods, services, and works. Procurement rules and policies seek to ensure that contract awards are free from corruption, conflicts of interest or anticompetitive practices, and that these vast sums of public funds generate value for money and support social, environmental, and innovative practices. There is always room for improvement, though. The adoption of digital technologies is seen as a strategic catalyst for procurement reform, to increase the effectiveness of procurement regulation. Digitalisation could reduce the administrative burden through automation, generate data insights to inform policies and boost efficiency in public spending, and serve as a living lab for GovTech experimentation.

However, the transformative potential presumed in digital technologies generates hype and excessive expectations on the true size and nature of the achievable improvements. It also tends to overshadow the required groundwork and preparatory investment. New digital governance risks and requirements are not always recognised or understood. The growing public sector digital capability gap raises further obstacles. Heightened expectations and a minimisation of the challenges can get on the way of successful reform. In ongoing research funded by the British Academy, I apply an innovative technology-centred methodology to assess the governance opportunities and challenges for procurement digitalisation. This blog post provides a summary of the main findings so far. I will also be discussing them with a stellar panel on 15 December 2022 (details and registration). (more…)

Is the Retained EU Law Bill a Journey Into the Sunset for Company Law in the UK?

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by Professor Charlotte Villiers, University of Bristol Law School

Brussels, Belgium, 2011

The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill (“the Bill”) is likely to have the reverse effect to what it aims to achieve: economic growth and business certainty (Explanatory Notes to the Bill) through clarification/simplification of UK law post-Brexit. There is lack of clarity, requiring lawyers and business advisers to search through layers of material to establish which “retained laws” are being targeted, the Retained EU Law Dashboard is not easy to navigate and nor does its list of relevant legislative instruments correspond to other official publications such as that of the House of Commons Library Briefing Paper, Legislating for Brexit: Statutory Instruments Implementing EU Law.  Moreover, the sunsetting deadlines for the targeted retained laws are likely to force the relevant departments to experience the dilemma of causing laws to expire without consulting the public fully, applying full Parliamentary scrutiny, or restating retained laws with inadequate resources to make such restatements sufficiently effective (Travers Smith: The Retained EU Law Bill: another Brexit cliff edge looms? October 2022). The resulting uncertainty that businesses will endure from this Bill and the regulatory gaps, at least in the short term, leave one wondering as to the value of the rush to legislate in this way. This blog focuses on the company law impacts as an example of the complexities and problems likely to arise, not just in the company law arena but in other important areas the development of which has been influenced significantly by European legislation, such as environment law. (more…)

Manston Holding Facility: Does the UK’s treatment of asylum seekers violate the law?

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by Professor Devyani Prabhat, The Law School, University of Bristol

A woman held at the Manston holding facility in Kent is taking legal action against Home Secretary Suella Braverman. The asylum seeker claims that she was held unlawfully in “egregiously defective conditions” at the centre. Her case is supported by the organisation Detention Action, and another case is being put forward by the charity Bail for Immigration Detainees. Braverman has denied ignoring legal advice about conditions at the centre, which is meant for a maximum of 1,600 people but was holding more than 4,000 and has had outbreaks of norovirus, scabies and diphtheria. Braverman has been accused of not making alternative arrangements, such as hotel bookings, to accommodate the additional people. The Manston facility has become a flashpoint for criticism of the government’s current and past policies, and treatment of asylum seekers. But the situation at Manston is not just dismal, it is a violation of legal requirements in international law, domestic law and the government’s own policies. (more…)

Mapping Recent Trends in Environmental Law: Is it time to worry?

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by Professor Margherita Pieraccini, University of Bristol Law School

Following the Brexit referendum, most[1] environmental law scholars became preoccupied that domestic environmental standards may decrease, both substantively and procedurally. After all, the majority of domestic environmental law derives from EU law and the EU institutions have played a seminal role in enforcing environmental law.

Years later, the preoccupation has not faded away.

There have been numerous developments in the field. I do not intend to provide a comprehensive review here but to focus on one area of environmental law that is attracting much attention lately. No, it is not climate change. It is nature. (more…)

Project: False Allegations Watch (FAW)

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 by Michael Naughton, the Law School, University of Bristol

Introduction: The competing camps on alleged sexual offences

Our existing contemporary moment can be characterised in terms of an increasingly divided society along strict adversarial lines. Whether it be the recent public conversations about Brexit, COVID vaccinations, climate change or mere routine day-to-day political debates, there seems little or no place for balance, nuance, nor objectivity. Indeed, in whatever debate one cares to consider, the choice presented to us seems to be to simply pick a side where: ‘you are either with us or against us’; ‘in or out’; ‘one of us or one of them’; ‘a friend or an enemy’. (more…)

A 21st Century Approach to Vicarious Liability Across the Common Law World

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by Professor Paula Giliker, University of Bristol Law School

The common law doctrine of vicarious liability in tort is both controversial and on the move.  In the last 20 years, this doctrine – which holds one party (usually an employer) strictly liable for the torts of an employee that take place in the course of their employment – has given rise to significant decisions in the apex courts of common law jurisdictions across the world.  There has been an unprecedented level of cross-citation between common law jurisdictions, not only of decisions of the UK Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Canada (Bazley v Curry [1999]; Lister v Hesley Hall Ltd [2001]; Various Claimants v Catholic Child Welfare Society (CCWS) [2012]) but also of decisions from the Supreme Court of Ireland (Hickey v McGowan [2017]), the Singapore Court of Appeal (Skandinavska Enskilda Banken AB (Publ) v Asia Pacific Breweries (Singapore) Pte Ltd [2011]; Ng Huat Seng v Mohammad [2017]), the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong (Ming An Insurance Co (HK) Ltd v Ritz-Carlton Ltd [2002] and the New Zealand Court of Appeal (S v Attorney-General [2003]).  It is an area therefore ripe for research but one in which this newly published book takes a distinct approach, arguing that to understand vicarious liability, we need to understand both the context in which these decisions are delivered and their underlying policy reasoning. (more…)

Can The UK Be Held Accountable for Breaches of the Human Rights of Asylum-Seekers Transferred to Rwanda?

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by Kathryn Allinson, University of Bristol Law School

On 14 April 2022, the UK and the Rwandan governments signed an MoU outlining plans for transferring asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda. The MoU has been subject to much criticism from academics, NGOs and the UNHCR. Criticism has focussed, first, on the attempts by the UK to divest itself of responsibility for asylum seekers. Second, it has highlighted the potential for further abuses of refugee and human rights law to occur against transferred individuals in Rwanda. The MoU is the latest in a range of mechanisms whereby States in the Global North attempt to externalise their borders and shift responsibility for refugees onto Global South states. (more…)

Deciding on the Unknown: Can we handle the truth? (And do we even want to?)

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by Joanna McCunn and Andrew Bell, University of Bristol Law School

 

In June this year, there was a revolution in the English court system. Under the Small Claims Paper Determination Pilot, some claimants seeking £1,000 or less lost the right to an oral hearing of their case. In pilot areas, only small claims involving a ‘significant factual dispute’ or ‘complex’ issues will be allowed their day in open court. If you are bringing a claim in the pilot area for something like a parking ticket, or flight delay compensation, or have another kind of low-value dispute with another person or company, you will not be able to have your argument presented in person. Regardless of your wishes, you will have to write your argument down and the judge will decide without anyone there.

(more…)

How Do We Create Good Online Classrooms? Through Strong Expectations!

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By Kit Fotheringham, University of Bristol Law School

“Treat someone as they are and they will remain as they are. Treat someone as they can and should be and they will become as they can and should be.”

― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The question of how to achieve good outcomes from online classrooms is a problem that has recently faced teachers and lecturers in all disciplines and at all educational levels. In this blog post, I reflect on the experience of leading online classes in a number of different contexts during the course of the global pandemic. I argue that good online classrooms do not emerge from nowhere, instead good online classrooms are created through strong expectations. (more…)