My most recent edited collection has now been published:
GS Ølykke & A Sanchez-Graells (eds), Reformation or Deformation of the EU Public Procurement Rules (Edward Elgar, 2016). It features contributions from a gender-balanced group of 16 young political science and EU economic law scholars based in 9 different EU/EEA Member States, including a number based at top UK universities. It is the result of a two year research project generously funded by the Copenhagen Business School and the Danish Gangstedfonden.
Using an innovative interdisciplinary ‘law and political science’ methodology, the book carries out a critical assessment of the reform of the EU public procurement rules in the period 2011-2014. It does this by a detailed assessment of the initial Commission proposal for new rules, the travaux preparatoires behind it, as well as the several inter-institutional negotiation and compromise texts that resulted in the 5th generation of EU public procurement directives in 2014. (more…)
By Dr Emma Hitchings, Senior Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School).
In the wake of legal aid cuts, individuals in the midst of a family law dispute who cannot pay for legal representation are faced with a stark choice: settling the dispute outside of court or representing themselves as a litigant in person. However, a new market has emerged to plug this post legal aid funding gap: the fee-charging McKenzie Friend. A non-lawyer assistant who charges a fee for services provided to litigants in person.
In what has been described as ‘nature’s own great climate experiment’, the 1992 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines provided scientists with data to refine their climate models. After the eruption, average global temperatures dropped temporarily as particles released into the stratosphere increased the Earth’s albedo. Solar Radiation Management (SRM) – or ‘reflecting sunlight to cool earth’ – developed notionally thereafter as a means of reducing global average temperatures resulting from increased greenhouse gases.
Pinatubo provided all kinds of data which helped increase the accuracy of climate models eventually predicting with relative certainty the temperature-cooling climatic impacts of SRM, whilst leaving relatively uncertain – or unknown – the extent of environmental impacts, such as those arising from changing patterns of rainfall. The current limitations of models in telling us about localised environmental uncertainties could be reduced if research into the effects of SRM took place outdoors, or in the field, so to speak. But that research would actually constitute deployment which itself would generate uncertain environmental effects. Given these significant constraints it is not possible to establish to what extent SRM technologies are effective or reliable and therefore it is imperative that a legitimate regulatory process is secured in which decisions about its research and deployment can be taken.
This new article* sets out how risky SRM field research might be regulated in the EU in such a way as to maximise legitimacy. It suggests that under particular conditions the EU could delegate to an independent agency powers to undertake what I call an incorporated risk assessment; an assessment in which science and politics, expertise and lay-knowledges are combined. Legitimacy would be maximised because the EU’s regulatory framework relating to the risks of SRM field research would be legal and also responsive, flexible, deliberative and inclusive. (more…)
EU public procurement law relies on the specific enforcement mechanisms of the Remedies Directive, which sets out EU requirements of administrative oversight and judicial protection for public contracts. Recent developments in the case law of the CJEU and the substantive reform resulting from the 2014 Public Procurement Package may have created gaps in the Remedies Directive, which led the European Commission to publicly consult on its revision in 2015. One year after, the outcome of the consultation has not been published, but such revision now seems to have been shelved. In a chapter* I am contributing to an edited collection, I take issue with the shelving of the revision process and critically assesses whether the Remedies Directive is still fit for purpose. (more…)
By Dr Devyani Prabhat, Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School).
In a recent article, published in the inter-disciplinary journal Law, Culture, and Humanities, I have argued that a surge in number of cases of cancellation of British citizenship indicates a return to a loyalty-protection model of citizenship which was popular earlier during the two World Wars. Here, I will go further, and say that Brexit and the debates of exclusion of EEA nationals from the UK, are also influenced by the very same loyalty-protection view. The loyalty-protection view had become unfashionable in the aftermath of the Second World War but is now back in vogue. (more…)
It can sometimes be easy to lose sight of the wood for the trees. The Policing and Crime Bill suggests a number of changes to the police complaints system and, having received its third reading in Parliament on June 13th looks set to make the statute books in due course.
However, as I have recently argued,* academic debate on police complaints can be conflicted and circular. Further, the reasoning in public debate is peppered with assertions (which seem to be presumed rather than tested) that reforms will deliver improvements in what, to my mind, is a worryingly ill-defined ‘public confidence’.
Policing is a necessarily conflicted social function. So by what measure can we assess the multiple reforms to police complaints and discipline that are about to be ushered in? In a recent article ‘Reconceptualising the Police Complaints Process as a Site of Contested Legitimacy Claims‘ I take a step back from the current academic and public debates and outline a new framework by which the true impact of these reforms might be assessed. (more…)
This post is based on an article* in which I argue that ignoring African particularity reduces the effectiveness of the international community and almost certainly ensures that international law is never obeyed… except in cases of self-interest.
What is the International Community?
At the sight of any potential cross-border malaise – disease, conflict, terrorism – calls are made to the international community to act. Why do the calls to the international community not go through? Is there a faulty connection? Or have we run out of airtime? The answer is quite simple. We are mostly dialling a wrong number. Depending on who is making the call, calls to ‘the international community’ could be obliquely referring to all states, all humanity, the UN, the US and Europe or states with liberal democracies. This identity crisis almost always results in a lot of buck-passing. As the poem goes ‘Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.’
Since the introduction of student fees, and particularly after the 2011 White Paper ‘Students at the Heart of the System’, English universities have been exposed to increasing commercial pressures. This has encountered significant opposition, and both the path of reform of the higher education sector and the resistance against it are echoed overseas.
However, this trend will not reverse in the immediate future, whatever the outcome of the consultation based on the 2015 Green Paper ‘Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice’. English universities will continue needing to adapt to increasing commercial pressures. However, they seem to have the cards stacked against them. English universities are not entirely free to pursue whichever commercial approaches they see fit. Their activity is highly regulated, and they are bound by significant constraints, both under domestic and EU law.
One area of increasing controversy is the possibility for English universities to move away from what are considered burdensome and restrictive public procurement procedures and adopt a strict commercial approach to the way the purchase supplies, services and commission works. Such flexibility would allow them to choose their suppliers and contractors more freely, reduce the red tape associated to their day to day operations, and some claim that this would unleash innovation. Unsurprisingly, this is catching the attention of practitioners in the field, and the Higher Education Procurement Academy is prioritising this issue. The trouble is that, while some practitioners have made claims supporting the adoption of such a commercial approach, others consider that reforms in the English higher education system are insufficient to warrant such a change.
In order to tackle these issues, together with my colleague Andrea Gideon, I looked in detail into the constraints that EU public procurement law impose on English universities. In our paper*, (more…)
Biblical law is certainly an area where perceptions are key. Even if you don’t know very much about biblical law, you’ll likely have an opinion about it.
What does biblical law make you think of? What associations spring to mind, especially when you turn off the internal editor? For some of us the associations are primarily negative. We might see it as being out-of-date, violent or misogynistic. Our perceptions may be profoundly moulded by the fact it has the death penalty for certain offences. For some of us, our associations may be exactly the reverse. We might see biblical law as being ethically relevant – authoritative, even. We may see it, positively, as being concerned with liberating the oppressed, protecting the weak, and seeking justice. (more…)
For centuries, English common law saw married women as inferior to their husbands, disadvantaged in terms of legal rights and to be protected from themselves and from the outside world. Most formal legal disadvantages have been removed, so it might well be asked why modern lawyers should bother to look at the old laws.
My most recent edited collection has now been published:
