Current Legal Problems 2025

Family law legislation has often been a focal point for reforms which are aimed as much at changing the societal attitudes and behaviours of family members as affecting their statutory entitlements or how the courts approach family disputes. There has been a tension in the approach of politicians between, on the one hand, using family law to influence how family members think and behave in relation to one another, and on the other hand, failing to engage with policy solutions that might more effectively achieve those aims. This article situates family law as a tool of social policy, but one which is often not suited to the policy problems to which they are applied. Family law, which generally responds to some form of family crisis, comes too late to have the desired effect. The problem...

Law reformers tend to be remembered as those responsible for transforming the law; but for their involvement, the law may not have changed as it has. Yet when evidence of this is not apparent, we might discard as remote campaigns which were in fact very important. These campaigns may have been neither immediately nor directly successful, but had, what I have termed, ‘inconspicuous impact’. Inconspicuous impact is an effect upon the law that did ultimately lead to change, but not in a linear or short-term fashion. The effect is inconspicuous because it relates to efforts to change the law that are not typically viewed or credited as having contributed to reform, perhaps because those efforts were initially or ostensibly unsuccessful. The inconspicuousness of impact is especially...

While legislation and administrative frameworks shape how landowners own or use their land, land law continues to be understood primarily as a private law subject. Public interventions are conventionally treated as outside land law’s remit and are rarely addressed in property theorization. Responding to this absence, this article outlines the scope of public land law—understood as the governance of land by the state in the public interest—introducing the concept of property as authorized, where land ownership and use are limited by authorization. The analysis draws on examples from planning, leasehold reform, and public access legislation, alongside human rights protections under Article 1 of Protocol 1 (A1P1) of the ECHR and the newly recognized fundamental common law right to property...

This article argues that fair administrative process—a central idea of contemporary administrative law—has an under-theorized social side. This is the idea that the public’s perceived (un)fair experiences of administrative processes, particularly in everyday encounters with government, affect their attitudes and behaviours over time. In the aggregate, this effect can potentially shape the capacity of the state to implement policy, the overall outcomes of public action, and, in turn, society. The article will show how existing empirical evidence suggests advancing understanding of this social side of fair administrative process could present a viable pathway to improving the efficacy of public action and what the state might be capable of achieving more broadly. However, it also suggests...

This article makes a case for the introduction of a new UK Accessibility Act to supplement existing equality law and outlines key ingredients to be included in such legislation. Such a reform would fulfil commitments under international human rights law, align with purported cross-government prioritization of accessibility, establish a more joined-up and effective regulatory structure and, most importantly, hasten progress toward a barrier-free society in which disabled people and others are enabled to learn, work, move and live as equals. The article has three main sections. The first elaborates on the accessibility obligations set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It also discusses recent legislative responses to these international human rights...

The liberal democratic ideal that public law can keep the exercise of public power within reviewable bounds and that administrative powers are necessarily subordinated to the law has been, in the EU and elsewhere, an important condition supporting the legal and political legitimacy of public power—an antidote to the authoritarian tendencies of administrations. In the EU, it has turned the Court of Justice, qua ultimate arbiter of EU law, into a pillar of integration. This perspective, however, ignores that some of the regulated activities can hardly operate under such subordination. The difficulties of judicial review in the face of technically complex and future-oriented regulatory activities, carried out under conditions of uncertainty, and having political implications, turn these...

The word ‘alien’ should be replaced with ‘non-citizen’ or ‘foreign national’ in UK case law and legislation. Legal transplantation of the term from England to other countries such as Australia and the United States which were part of the British Empire, and are largely populated by European settlers, resulted in departures from its original usage to mean non-subject. It was used to control foreign populations, as well as those already present long-term within these countries (including indigenous populations) in a deeply racialised manner took place. In the UK, exclusion of former colonised subjects from the British Isles was attempted by removal of subjecthood status and associated legal barriers to their entry and residence rather than through identifying aliens. While in present-day...

This article considers the work of Solon, the most significant lawgiver of archaic Athens, as a case study within ancient Athens as an ‘“historical laboratory”’ for legal philosophy: seeking to make it legible in terms of, and relevant toward, a reassessment of the issues at stake between H. L. A. Hart and Lon L. Fuller in their rival theorizing of the nature of law. The case of Solon is of interest despite—or rather because—of the fact that, as a single figure who laid down laws, an archaic Greek lawgiver would seem prima facie to be as unnecessary a figure for Hart’s positivism as for the common law perspective which Fuller championed. This article contends that, in his activity of promulgating laws for an identified purpose, Solon as an Athenian lawgiver can be best interpreted through...

A key function of family law is to regulate family breakdown and conflict. Consequently, family law has been characterized as under threat as family disputes have been diverted from courts and lawyers, and its norms have become inaccessible to many. This article questions the scale of the threat. It argues for a rethinking of the boundaries of family law to shift focus away from dispute resolution and towards more constructive and anticipatory approaches. It shows how family law norms and rules might usefully be understood at the beginning of, or during, relationships. As such, the relevance of family law can be recaptured by seeing it as a tool for better informed—and perhaps normatively better—relationships over time; family law can be for family life, as well as family conflict...

How can the development of public international law work in a decentralised and pluralist international society, where actors and institutions increasingly and deeply disagree on key questions? The paper identifies two concepts for discussing its viability: clarity, about the current law and the claim for change, and coherence of that claim with the existing law, both substantively and in relation to relevant procedures and institutions. After explaining how these concepts operate in international law more generally, the paper considers their application to the case study of compensation within the particular institutional setting of the United Nations International Law Commission.