Privacy rights are growing apace, as can be seen from a continuing stream of judgments from UK and European courts, the rise of special interest privacy groups and other institutions tasked to protect privacy. Privacy has – its proponents suggest – at last arrived as a fully fledged legal right. However, despite these advancements, I suggest that privacy is becoming less prevalent in society; primarily because of technological and cultural changes, but also because the technical legal implementation of privacy is highly problematic. In this article it is argued that this seeming paradox should be more critically examined by socio-legal researchers who, to date, have done little to test the assertions and assumptions of the privacy lobby. This article maintains that there is a need for more investigation of the basis and assumptions behind data protection and privacy law and that a more robust analysis of the claims and rhetoric for these rights will change our attitudes towards privacy developments. The sociological conception that ‘underlying all social interaction there seems to be a fundamental dialectic’ will be used to undermine the legal notion of privacy as an individualistic ‘fundamental right’.

The purpose of this article is to offer an analysis of the nature of contemporary legal power over the ending of human life in medical contexts. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s characterisations of power relations in the sphere of life and death in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, it is argued that, in its current regulation of the ending of human life in this area, law displays elements of two of those modes, or forms, of power identified by Foucault – the juridical and the disciplinary. This argument is illustrated by reference to two recent cases – Re A (Children) and Re B (an adult: refusal of medical treatment) – and set against a background of shifting modes of governmentality (here, the movement from medicalisation to legalisation). Through an analysis of the forms of legal power in this particular context, the article also has a broader purpose – to advance an alternative approach to the question of power within the academic medical law field. Specifically, unlike the standard form of legal academic inquiry in this area – that is, one which is driven mainly by a concern for ethics and resolving ethical dilemmas – it is suggested that an appreciation of the importance that institutional context(s) and requirements play in medical law is necessary if we are to understand fully both the factors constitutive of legal power and the subtle, and often controversial, effects that flow from the manner in which it is exercised and asserted.

This article seeks to establish law and literature as two distinct yet interacting fields through which the norms of a particular culture are filtered. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory, it suggests that legal and literary statements are contextualised by norms and values that exert symbolic violence to the extent that, through communication and knowledge, they define social subjects and their material practices. The specific objective of this article is to map out the network of relationships between the apparently separate fields of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 and the Criminal Justice Act 1948 and Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and to understand the ways in which law and literature related to symbolic violence as they created, maintained or countered norms which constituted the English culture of juvenile offenders in the 1950s.

Lord Kames (Henry Home) (1696–1782) was a well-known jurist, philosopher and judge in the Scottish Enlightenment, whose writings on aesthetics and literary criticism, especially, were very significant in the eighteenth century and later, not only in Britain and the United States, but also in France and Germany. His works on law and legal history were important mainly during his lifetime, but at least one aspect of his legal writings deserves special attention today: his concept of property, which he never stated as one comprehensive theory. Nevertheless, it pervades most of his work. This article seeks to extract and piece together, from a number of his legal and non-legal works, the elements of this quite original property theory which comprises legal-doctrinal, philosophical-theoretical, historical, sociological and psychological, aesthetic-moral and economic aspects. Together these elements can be restated as a surprisingly coherent property system, which may enrich discussions in modern property theory.