Current Legal Problems 2026

This article develops and applies a four-part patriarchal framework to explain how family courts translate normative ideals into outcomes in domestic-abuse cases. It links: (1) the juridical construction of intensive, facilitative motherhood alongside a thin yet symbolically central fatherhood; (2) an institutional field oriented to settlement and the preservation of contact; (3) epistemic practices that generate testimonial deficits and hermeneutic gaps; and (4) parental alienation (PA) as an epistemic technology that reinterprets children’s fear and mothers’ protective conduct as manipulation. Conceptually, the article reconceives PA as a circulating repertoire of inferences and tools that stabilise mother-blame in family court decision-making, even where the label is avoided or...

Faith in democracy and established institutions seems to be at a low ebb. Democratic backsliding – the weakening or evisceration of institutions designed to sustain democracy – appears to be spreading. ‘Intermediary’ institutions like the bureaucracy are seen as obstructing populist politicians. But we are in danger of forgetting that no successful state can function without a bureaucracy. So what is the role of the civil service in a democracy, and what are the limits to that role? This article examines traditional understandings of the UK civil service in public law theory. The civil service has largely been neglected by constitutional scholars, in part because the dominant constitutional doctrine of ministerial responsibility tells us that what matters are ministers. Ministerial...

This article revisits the long-running debate as to the nature of equitable property and of the trust. It aims to clarify and develop two claims: first, there is a fundamental formal and conceptual difference between equitable property rights and legal property rights; second, it is a mistake to understand the trust as involving a split between legal and equitable ownership. The article argues that, whilst there may be an intuitive appeal to thinking of the holder of an equitable property right as having a direct right in a resource, or to thinking of a beneficiary of a trust as having a form of ownership, such a view misunderstands both the form of, and justification for, the third party effects of equitable property rights and of trusts. The article considers three examples of appellate...

This article explores what it means to be a Member State of the EU during a period of increasing geopolitical disorder. Although the EU must adapt to a host of new strategic challenges, it is obliged to do so within the peculiar framework established by its own constitutional system. In that regard, the EU suffers from particular vulnerabilities created by certain types of Member State conduct: in particular, unilateral national action that, though prima facie lawful under the treaties, nevertheless disrupts and fragments efforts to secure more collective interests and responses; and deliberate attempts by populist-authoritarian leaders, notably Hungary’s Orbán, to undermine the EU’s own values and effectiveness from within. The analysis investigates the potential for fundamental...

Various insolvency theories have sought to justify the legitimacy of insolvency law. While the three canonical theories arrived at their central claims through different methods, they share a broadly functionalist orientation and common core: insolvency as a form of social cooperation. Where they diverge is in the normative commitments they attach to that core and in the methodological approaches that give rise to them. Baird argues that the divide may possibly only be resolved with aesthetics and morals, while Gross contends that existing theories fail to articulate the philosophical basis of their claims, leaving the field without a fully developed account of its normative foundations. This article responds to these challenges, and broader question of insolvency’s legitimacy, by...

This article explores the roles that regulatory norms play within EU competition law assessment. The question matters both for the consistency of the supervisory framework for economic activity in the EU and to better understand the legitimate concerns of competition law. Comparing the orthodox understanding of the inter-relationship between competition law and other regulatory norms with the contextual approach of contemporary antitrust assessment, the article examines potential tensions between these approaches through two case studies: regulatory non-compliance and regulatory gaming. In doing so, it considers how the more diverse public interest values within other market regulation may find indirect expression within competition enforcement and asks how we might justify the use of...

Notwithstanding the passing of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004, and the Equality Act in 2010, public discourse in the UK is saturated with controversies and conflicts about the definition and significance of gender and sex, to the extent that some have described this moment as one of gender/sex ‘culture wars’. This article analyses recent sex/gender conflicts that culminated in the 2025 landmark case For Women Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers on the legal definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010, before stepping back in time to examine the ongoing legacy of the 1970 decision of Corbett v Corbett. Through an analysis of Corbett, I demonstrate how current legal ‘problem-representations’ of gender and sex depict them as binary, biological and fundamental but separable aspects of human...

This article examines the place of hope in environmental law and environmental law scholarship, at a time marked by ecological crisis and ongoing questions about how this crisis should be addressed in teaching and research. Situating the analysis within the emerging interdisciplinary field of hope studies, it asks: is environmental law hopeful? While there is no straightforward answer, the article explores some of the ways in which hope may be relevant in this context. It proposes two complementary orientations. First, thinking towards hope treats hope as an object of inquiry, examining how hope appears and operates in environmental law through both ‘eventful’ moments, such as landmark decisions or emergency declarations, and more durable, ‘institutionalised’ forms, including legislated...

Liberal values have become prominent in the recent case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and are becoming the driving force behind the EU’s legal and political discourse. The CJEU insists that these values do not merely function in the sphere of politics. As an integral part of the very identity of the European Union as a common legal order, they also find concrete expression in principles containing legally binding obligations for the Member States. This raises the question of the CJEU’s role. Yet behind this institutional concern lies the further question of how to understand these values themselves. The applied meaning of these values will have to be not too thick, but also not too thin. While the CJEU must not pre-empt reasoned debate over the concretisation of...

This article critically re-examines the claim that bereaved and affected families are ‘at the heart’ of public inquiries. Moving beyond procedural inclusion, it develops an account of justice as inheritance to analyse how families and state institutions engage with the afterlives of state violence. Inheritance is understood as both personal and political, structuring three core demands made by families: recognition of continuing unresolved loss, the search for answers, and the pursuit of a transformative legacy to prevent repetition. Drawing on case studies of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, the Cumberlege Review, and the Kirkup Review into maternity services in East Kent, the article shows that inquiries’ underlying methodologies are insufficiently responsive to...