Articles

Introduction   The principle of parliamentary sovereignty has been a long-held tenet of the UK’s unwritten constitution. AV   Dicey outlined its features in 1885. However, 87 years later, the UK became a member of the European Economic Communities, with the European Communities Act 1972 providing the domestic legal basis for EU law in the UK. Lord Denning described EU law as ‘an incoming tide […] [that] cannot be held back’.[1] However, others, such as Professor Phillip Norto

Dog-races, football pools, Woolworth’s, the pictures, Gracie Fields, Wall’s ice cream, potato crisps, Celanese stockings, dart-boards, pin-tables, cigarettes, cups of tea, and Saturday evenings in the four ale bar.[1] This rapid-fire enumeration of distinctive features of Englishness, one of George Orwell’s recurring party-tricks, seems today a tall order. What is it to be English? Those like Tory MP Robert Jenrick rely on inane tautologies: English identity is simply English

If you tolerate this, your children will be next! Manic Street Preachers, 1998   Introduction   The issue of immigration and human rights law, or more precisely, the human rights of people on the move, has become one of the most urgent challenges for many Western societies. Syrian refugees walking across Europe in 2015 almost faded away in the collective memory. They were replaced by the images of people clinging on the planes leaving Kabul, a mass exodus from Ukraine, people

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990 Harlem, USA) lives and works in Hudson Valley, New York. Tschabalala is an artist and builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the black body. She constructs depictions of predominantly female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self's work seek to expand her critical in

‘Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy,...

Gus John is an award-winning writer, education campaigner, and lecturer. His work spans the fields of education policy, management, and...

Helena Wray is a professor of migration law at the University of Exeter. Her extensive experience in this area spans several...

Ali Ghaderi is a young refugee from Iran. He arrived in the UK five years ago through a family reunification scheme which was available...

A snapshot in time of English folk music, queer visibility, and gender non-conformity Alex Garden is a fiddle player, guitarist,...

A case for the enhanced pre-sentence report in England and Wales, exploring how the Canadian approach to racially disproportionate...

Like many other Rwandans, I heard for the first time of the United Kingdom (UK)’s plan to send its unsolicited asylum seekers to Rwanda...

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to...

We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape, till custom make it Their...

Karl Heinz Bohrer’s A Little Pleasure in Decline. Essays on Britain. [1] My friend Karl Heinz Bohrer died on 4 August 2021. He was seen...

The last few months, in particular the furore over Partygate,[1] have scarred the reputation of many of Britain’s most vital...

I. Introduction The rise of family-owned businesses has resulted in the clustering of several companies and their subsidiaries under the...

Introduction Law centres are providers of legal aid and have been in existence since the early 1970s. Their main role has been to assist those that reside within their local communities. They specialise predominantly in social welfare or ‘poverty’ law as their legal representatives possess detailed knowledge about the problems their local residents face. This article is divided into timeframes and will consider the development of law centres in the UK from 1945 to 2021. Betwe

On 12 January 2022, there was an attempt to destroy, or at least damage, the statue of Prospero and Ariel installed outside the BBC’s...

Currently Professor of Government at King’s College London, Professor Vernon Bogdanor is a leading expert in British constitutional...

I. Introduction Issues of priority are at the centre of English land law. Where a plot of land in which a third party has an interest is transferred from one party to another, a conflict arises between this third party and the transferee: whose interest has priority? If push comes to shove, can the transferee prevent the third-party interest holder from exercising her right, or is the third-party interest-holder entitled to enjoy her interest in the face of the transferee’s o

1. Introduction The criminal law continues to grapple with the concept of ‘deceptive sex’ and struggles to draw the appropriate parameters around the provisions on consent contained within the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (henceforth, ‘the SOA’). Particularly notable in this regard have been cases involving ‘gender fraud’, wherein the defendant (D) is alleged to have deceived the complainant (V) as to their gender in order to procure sexual relations. This was found to be the cas

Shakespeare understood much about the role of law in society, possibly thanks to his direct links with London’s Inns of Court. The Inns...

The United Kingdom has experienced two major political crises in the last five years. Brexit and COVID-19 are crises of very different kinds. But they have a significant feature in common whose implications will live with us for a long time. They are milestones in the demise of liberal democracy.   The model which will replace liberal democracy is already emerging. It will be more authoritarian and less dependent on Parliamentary deliberation. It will view our society as a gr

The recent upsurge of interest in the history of the British Empire has produced a wealth of literature that often presents empire and imperialism in a hegemonic light, couched in a dichotomy that sets the ‘oppressor’ against the ‘oppressed’, the ‘coloniser’ against the ‘colonised’, and so on. Underpinning fashionable postcolonial discourse, this binary terminology can obscure important nuances of political thought in its proper historical context, such as how prominent figur