This is a tribute delivered at the funeral service for Professor Valentine Korah on 23 August 2023.
Professor Michael Freeman, FBA (Emeritus Professor of English Law) was a world-renowned scholar in the fields of Family Law, Child Law and Policy, Children’s Rights, Medical Ethics and the Law and Jurisprudence and Legal Theory. He was particularly passionate about children’s rights and his pioneering work in this and his other fields set the stage for debates that continue to this day.
This article explores the problem that both modern private equity (PE) firms, and collateralised loan obligation (CLO) lenders to PE portfolio companies, have incentives to avoid a formal restructuring of PE portfolio companies in financial distress. The author is concerned that this may lead to negative social costs for suppliers, employees, customers and even government agencies. She explores how and why the problem arises, and the ways in which corporate and corporate insolvency law might be able to respond to it. Some suggestions are made, but it is accepted that any solution involves a sensitive balance that needs to be approached with considerable care.
The paper compares and evaluates newer laws on sexual assault in Germany (2016), Sweden (2018) and Spain (2022). It focuses on the main challenge for law reform in this field: the complexity of consent-based rules. Before drafting new offence descriptions, the variety of models of consent should be analysed and their advantages and disadvantages considered. Lawmakers should also pay attention to situations that either make consent impossible or endanger the validity of factual consent.
As part of its ‘pro-innovation’ approach to artificial intelligence (AI), the UK has left public sector AI procurement and deployment to ‘regulation by contract’ based on thin guidance. Borrowing from the description of AI ‘hallucinations’ as plausible but incorrect answers given with high confidence by AI systems, I argue that this is a ‘regulatory hallucination’: an incorrect answer to the challenge of regulating the procurement and use of AI by the public sector. The pretence that public buyers can ‘confidently and responsibly procure AI technologies’ can generate individual harms and broader negative social effects as the public sector ramps up AI adoption and accumulates a potentially significant stock of AI deployments across all areas of public sector activity. I sketch an...
This paper foregrounds the defendant as a central actor in trials for mass atrocity. It excavates the practices and scripts of these trials to argue that they are driven by an impulse to construct flat perpetrator portraits. Perpetrators who enter into atrocity’s glass booth are transformed into defendants who are hostis humani generis. Perpetrators who escape this mythification are still viewed as perpetual perpetrators, the moment of their participation in atrocity radiating outwards to demarcate the juridical bookends of their lives. These lives, moreover, are seen as consisting of active choices representing uncompromised agency. The paper suggests that these portraits are tied to international criminal law’s attempt to justify itself as a normative project that claims to act in the...
International and regional courts are increasingly being asked to determine the rights and responsibilities of states in relation to climate harm. The context for such requests is that the 2015 Paris Agreement, comprising primarily procedural obligations and obligations of conduct, and premised on national determination, appears by itself radically insufficient to resolve the existential climate crisis the planet is facing. This article explores if this is indeed the case and argues that the 2015 Paris Agreement must be interpreted in its ‘normative environment’. The ‘normative environment’ includes the customary international law principle of harm prevention, other treaties, including human rights ones, and a set of principles of varying legal status but considerable operational...
The recent revival of geopolitical competition has been accompanied by the meteoric rise of military spending across the globe. In light of this development, this article advances three claims. First, I posit that the political economy of war should be of concern to international lawyers and to anyone who is committed to peace. Second, I show that international law has been consistently unsuccessful and is currently singularly unambitious when it comes to naming, regulating, and sanctioning the political economy of war. Finally, I argue that the consistent failure of the field cannot be wholly attributed to historical contingencies. Rather, this is because armaments exist in the intersection of two logics, the logic of the state and the logic of the market, that have mystifying effects...
Courts tasked with ruling on religious freedom claims in the private sector workplace have been faced with the following challenge: too weak a protection of religious freedom and it will become meaningless; too strong, and individual freedom will be stifled. Recently, courts on each side of the Atlantic have, respectively, leant towards each of these two extremes. In Europe, courts have afforded minimalist and, as I will argue, too restrictive a protection to religious interests. Whether out of deference to state constitutional traditions or economic interests, they have often undermined the protection of religious freedom. Conversely, in the United States, the Supreme Court has granted a maximalist and, as I will argue, excessive protection to religious interests. The article will...
This article investigates how local authorities in England seek to compel property developers to mitigate the impact of property development on local communities and on local infrastructure needs through the use of planning obligations made by agreement with developers pursuant to section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. I pose three important new questions about these ‘section 106 agreements’. How do these agreements contribute to a development culture in which private developers do not always perform their public policy obligations? How does the presence of ostensibly binding promises in these agreements facilitate the exercise of regulatory decision-making in planning and property development processes? How do local authorities manage the implementation of novel developer...