Tag: research nutshell

New Challenges for European Comparative Law

Posted on by legalresearch

By Dr Jule Mulder, Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School).

Dr Jule Mulder has published an article on European comparative law methodology entitled New Challenges for European Comparative Law: The Judicial Reception of EU Non-Discrimination Law and a turn to a Multilayered Culturally-informed Comparative Law Method for a better Understanding of the EU Harmonization.[1] This article argues that comparative law needs to explore its critical potential when engaging with the European harmonization process and its effects on the law of the Member States. (more…)

The importance of the advice sector in the context of legal aid cuts

Posted on by legalresearch

By Dr Sarah Moore, Lecturer in Sociology (Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath).

The Law School blog has the pleasure of welcoming this guest post by Dr Sarah Moore, who was one of the participants in the recent book launch of Advising in Austerity. Reflections on challenging times for advice agencies (Policy Press, 2017). Dr Moore is also the co-author of Legal aid in crisis. Assessing the impact of reform (Policy Press, 2017) and offers here her insightful views on the need to boost the activities and funding of the legal advice sector.

Anyone familiar with legal aid reform will know that the Legal Aid and Sentencing of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) has dramatically altered the meaning and nature of legal aid. It has meant, amongst other things, a significant reduction in funding, largely achieved by taking a large number of areas of civil law out of scope, including private family law cases, and almost all cases involving social welfare, housing, medical negligence, immigration, debt, and employment.

The most strenuous critics of LASPO have pointed out that the recent funding cuts restrict people’s access to justice. In answering to these problems, LASPO incorporated a set of exceptions. Those who could provide evidence that they had been victims of domestic violence, for example, were to be given access to legal aid to pursue family law cases. And an Exceptional Case Funding caveat was incorporated in the Act for those who could successfully make a case that their human rights would be breached without publicly-funded legal assistance. Both have been woefully inadequate. (more…)

ESG investing and section 172 of the Companies Act 2006: Desperate times call for soft law measures

Posted on by legalresearch

By Dr Georgina Tsagas, Lecturer in Corporate Law (University of Bristol Law School).

In this blog entry, Dr Tsagas provides an overview of her proposal for the reform of the UK’s Corporate Governance Code. Her full arguments will soon be published in G Tsagas, “Section 172 of the Companies Act 2006: Desperate times call for soft law measures”, in N Boeger and C Villiers (eds.), Shaping the Corporate Landscape: towards corporate reform and enterprise diversity, Oxford: Hart Publishing, forthcoming.

Section 172 CA 2006: Not worth the paper it is written on?

Section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 has been afforded much attention during Parliamentary discussions on the codification of directors’ duties and has since the enactment of the Companies Act 2006 occupied much space in discussions among scholars who share an academic interest in the shareholder/stakeholder debate, in policy documents on law reforms following a series of corporate failures, as well as in company law lecture notes provided by Law Schools across the UK.

The previous duty to act bona fide in the interests of the company has been substituted by section 172 CA 2006, which imposes on a director the duty to ‘act in a way he considers, in good faith, would be most likely to promote the success of the company for the benefit of its members as a whole’ and in doing so must have regard to a series of factors listed in the section. The factors are: (a) the likely consequences of any decision in the long term, (b) the interests of the company’s employees, (c) the need to foster the company’s business relationships with suppliers, customers and others, (d) the impact of the company’s operations on the community and the environment, (e) the desirability of the company maintaining a reputation for high standards of business conduct, and (f) the need to act fairly as between members of the company.

With the UK leaving the EU, it is a critical time to discuss enlightened decision-making on boards, considering that, arguably, one of the key benefits of joining the EU with regard to UK company law, was that the UK was prompted to consider incorporating provisions affording a certain level of protection to the interests of other constituencies across a wide range of company and securities law Acts and regulations. What often escapes the attention of participants in discussions surrounding s. 172 CA 2006, is the section’s limitations not so much in terms of it prioritising the interests of shareholders over the interests of other constituencies, but with regard to its enforcement and utility overall. (more…)

Bristol Law Review’s 2017 Edition Published

Posted on by legalresearch

By Miss Christina Chambers, Law Student (MA, 2017) and Editor-in-Chief of the Bristol Law Review for the 2017 Edition (University of Bristol Law School).

The University of Bristol Law School is proud to announce the publication of this year’s edition of the Bristol Law Review, which is freely accessible at https://bristollawreview.co.uk/print/. The Law School Blog also warmly welcomes its Editor in Chief’s reflections on the importance of this project for our students and as an opportunity to further develop the Law School as a learning community.

It was my great privilege to be the Editor-in-Chief of the Bristol Law Review for the 2017 Edition. The Bristol Law Review represents a platform for exceptional students to showcase their writing and also provides a unique educational experience for its editors. As Dr Eirik Bjorge so rightly pointed out in the preface to this year’s Law Review, “[m]any of today’s law students strive first and foremost to be qualified for ‘jobs in the modern world’, and believe that the study of law in a university should be geared in the first instance towards learning just about enough successfully to answer four prepared questions in an examination.”

At times the pressure to consider a law degree as a means to an end is overwhelming. I am sure that there are a great number of students who would consider the process of spending hours reading, editing and critiquing the work of their peers to be some sort of punishment, but this is to ignore the great benefits that come with such an endeavor. Of course, there is the instant benefit of reading in great detail the best work that has been produced at all levels of study and incorporating the strongest elements of this into your own work. The feedback I received from the editorial board this year following their training session certainly attests to this! However, there is also the long term benefit of truly engaging with law as an academic pursuit, something that I believe is sometimes overlooked in the effort to simply make it through your degree. (more…)

The dualist system of the English Constitution and the Victorian acquis

Posted on by legalresearch

By Dr Eirik Bjorge, Senior Lecturer in Public International Law (University of Bristol Law School).*

The Supreme Court in Miller set out the model that ‘the dualist system is a necessary corollary of Parliamentary sovereignty’ (para 57), or in the words of Campbell McLachlan in his admirable Foreign Relations Law, cited by the Supreme Court:

If treaties have no effect within domestic law, Parliament’s legislative supremacy within its own polity is secure. If the executive must always seek the sanction of Parliament in the event that a proposed action on the international plane will require domestic implementation, parliamentary sovereignty is reinforced at the very point at which the legislative power is engaged (para 5.20).

As the Court said, this passage ‘neatly summarises’ the position: but, beyond the neatness of summarization, does it correctly capture the constitutional position? (more…)

Advising in Austerity

Posted on by legalresearch

By Prof Morag McDermont, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, and Mr Ben Crawford, Knowledge Exchange Fellow (University of Bristol Law School).

Research led by Prof Morag McDermont of University of Bristol Law School has explored the ways in which advice organisations such as Citizens Advice (CA) have become key actors in legal arenas, particularly for citizens who face the most disadvantage in upholding their rights. Findings from a four year study in partnership with Strathclyde University, highlight the importance of free-to-access advice in enabling people to tackle problems and engage with the legal and regulatory frameworks that govern their lives.

The advice sector, however, is under threat, as a new book Advising in Austerity: Reflections on challenging times for advice agencies (edited by Samuel Kirwan and published by Policy Press ) demonstrates. The book, co-written by the research team and advisers in the field, highlights both the possibilities and the challenges for an advice sector that largely relies on volunteers to provide a vital interface between citizens and the everyday problems of debt, health, employment and much more.  Despite the skills and enthusiasm of the workforce, many services are caught between rising demand and large-scale funding cuts, as traditional sources of revenue from local authorities and legal aid are dramatically reduced. Across the network, reductions in core funding are forcing agencies to reduce or reconfigure services. In particular, the face-to-face, generalist advice model that provides a holistic assessment of client’s problems is under pressure as services are reduced in favour of telephone or online support.

(more…)

Roundtable on Comparative Law and Interdisciplinarity: Practical Approaches

Posted on by legalresearch

By Dr Jule Mulder, Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School).

The University of Bristol Law School hosted a roundtable on Practical Approaches towards Comparative Law and Interdisciplinarity on 8 February 2017. It was organised by Dr Giorgia Guerra (University of Padua, Italy) and Dr Jule Mulder (University of Bristol, UK). The roundtable brought together a number of comparative law researchers and provided a small and informal forum to consider interdisciplinary approaches within the context of European comparative private law and constitutional law. It explored how research on modern technologies, social sciences and arts and humanities can enrich comparative law projects within the context of (European) private and constitutional law. The presentations were chaired by Dr Athanasios Psygkas and Prof Paula Giliker. (more…)

The Rape Trial and the Limits of Liberal Reform. And Why Legal Scholars need to do Theory Better

Posted on by legalresearch

By Dr Yvette Russell, Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School).

Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1922-25) by John Singer Sargent

In recently published work I engage in a philosophical and psychoanalytic excavation of legal discourse on (and in) the rape trial.[1]  In this post I briefly summarise my key claims arguing, while I do, that legal scholars must diversify the theoretical tools they draw on in confronting issues of social justice.

Much feminist scholarship on rape asserts that the law has reached a best practice plateau and justice for victims is now being held back primarily by the aberrant ‘attitudes’ of criminal justice actors charged with implementing the law. Those attitudes, it is argued, militate against the best intentions of law makers charged with stemming burgeoning attrition rates. Attrition refers to the phenomena – not anomalous in the criminal justice system, but particularly marked in cases of sex crime – whereby alleged instances of sexual violence drop out of the criminal justice system.  This occurs at multiple points, the most notable of which is the first point where a victim makes the decision to report to police.  (more…)

Rape Investigations and police accountability: the case of the Black Cab Rapist

Posted on by legalresearch

By Prof Joanne Conaghan, Professor of Law (University of Bristol Law School).

The case of the Black Cab rapist, John Worboys, may well qualify as one of the most egregious failures of modern policing of our times. Alleged to have assaulted over 100 women using his taxi as a lure and a crime site, Worboys terrorised women in the London Metropolitan area for the best part of a decade before eventually being apprehended and imprisoned in 2009 for 19 separate sexual assaults.  This week the Worboys case is once again in the public eye as a claim by two of his victims, DSD and NBV, that the Metropolitan Police violated their human rights by failing adequately to investigate their claims comes before the Supreme Court.

One has to wonder how such serious criminal activity in a public setting could go unchecked for so long. The simple answer is that the Metropolitan Police failed Worboys’ victims utterly and unequivocally, their investigation marred by multiple systemic and operational failings, as elaborated in painstaking detail by Mr Justice Green in a High Court judgment in 2014.  (more…)

EU Non-Discrimination Law in the Courts. Approaches to Sex and Sexualities Discrimination in EU Law

Posted on by legalresearch

By Dr Jule Mulder, Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School).

img_6534In January 2017, my first monograph entitled EU Non-Discrimination Law in the Courts will be published with Hart Publishing/Bloomsbury. The monograph compares the Dutch and German application of EU non-discrimination law focusing on discrimination on grounds of sex and sexual orientation. It includes an analysis of the case law on direct as well as indirect discrimination and covers the cases which are linked to Article 157 TFEU, the Framework and Recast Directives (excluding equal pay for equal value and social security law).

Since the year 2000, the material and personal scope of EU non-discrimination law has been significantly broadened and has challenged national courts to introduce a comprehensive equality framework into their national law to correspond with the European standard.

The book provides a multi-layered culturally informed comparison of juridical approaches to EU (in)direct sex and sexualities discrimination and its implementation and application in Germany and the Netherlands. It examines how and why national courts apply national non-discrimination law with a European origin differently, although the legislation derives from the same set of EU law and the national courts have to respect the interpretive competence of the Court of Justice of the European Union. As such, it provides an in-depth analysis of the national legal and non-legal context which influences and shapes the implementation and application of non-discrimination law and reveals how some of these factors affect the interpretation and application of national non-discrimination law with a European origin. (more…)