This article explores narrative devices in legal rhetoric, and the use of these devices for asserting the authority to distinguish lawful from unlawful inflictions of bodily harm. The argument made here is that the moral language adopted by judges in criminal appeal judgments on risky sexual and/or violent consensual acts embraces a set of interconnecting narratives otherwise observed in literature, and relating to gender, sexuality and race. I try to show how the reading of these legal cases is enriched by identifying these narratives, locating them as rhetorical strategies and reflecting on their uses in judicial decision-making. In particular, I argue that in the case-law explored here, these interconnected narratives are deployed in order to assert law's dominance over an imagined ‘savage’ other. Through this ongoing repudiation of savagery the distinctions between normative and non-normative, violent and non-violent, lawful and unlawful are constructed.

This article analyses the EU Commission's policy-based approach to regulating Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the role of international human rights law as a normative source for the regulatory output in two initiatives launched in 2002 and 2006. The article argues as a starting point that the understanding of CSR as ‘beyond law’ tends to shroud the contributions that international human rights law and legal theory based regulatory technique lend to CSR normativity and regulation, not only outside the EU but also within. The EU experience shows that due to power relations and their impact on multi-stakeholder negotiations and their outcome, this potential does necessarily unfold. It also shows that the procedural design of reflexive multi-stakeholder regulatory processes is significant for bringing forth the normative contributions of international law to CSR in public–private regulation. Finally, the article suggests that within the public policy context in which EU CSR regulation is emerging, the normative role of international human rights law which the Commission suggests for CSR in Europe and the application of the reflexive regulatory technique contribute to a substantive as well as procedural juridification of CSR, especially in the formative stage of defining CSR normativity. The latter adds a significant new perspective to the understanding of CSR and its relation to law, although it need not conflict with the understanding of CSR being ‘voluntary’ in the sense of action beyond direct legal obligations.

In recent years homophobic bullying has received increased attention from NGOs, academics and government sources and concern about the issue crosses traditional moral and political divisions. This article examines this ‘progressive’ development and identifies the ‘conditions of possibility’ that have enabled the issue to become a harm that can be spoken of. In doing so it questions whether the readiness to speak about the issue represents the opposite to prohibitions on speech (such as the notorious Section 28) or whether it is based on more subtle forms of governance. It argues that homophobic bullying is heard through three key discourses (‘child abuse’, ‘the child victim’ and ‘the tragic gay’) and that, while enabling an acknowledgement of certain harms, they simultaneously silence other needs and experiences. It then moves to explore the aspirational and ‘liberatory’ political investments that underlie these seemingly ‘common-sense’ descriptive discourses and concludes with a critique of the quasi-criminal responses that the dominant political agenda of homophobic bullying gives rise to. The article draws on, and endeavours to develop a conversation between, critical engagements with the contemporary politics of both childhood and sexuality.

I argue that law is not best considered an essentially contested concept. After first explaining the notion of essential contestability and disaggregating law into several related concepts, I show that the most basic and general concept of law does not fit within the criteria offered for essential contestation. I buttress this claim with the explanation that essential contestation is itself a framework for understanding complex concepts and therefore should only be applied when it would yield a greater understanding of uses of the concept to which it is applied. I then show that, even if law meets some basic criteria of essential contestation, applying the appellation does not helpfully illuminate the most general concept of law and therefore it should not be used, while allowing that it might be more useful for the related concept of the rule of law.

This article argues there is value in exploring the resonance between the regulation of international agricultural trade as a specific topic and the general notion of international trade regulation in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). It explores particular problems to illuminate more general concerns. In this ascendant way of looking at things, certain aspects of agricultural trade regulation have direct resonance for other areas covered by the WTO agreements. We might see these additional dimensions as addressing a different series of questions: the nature of agreement and the different ways in which agreement can manifest itself. The two dimensions are the nature of international agricultural trade as a polycentric problem and the way accepted concepts and categories influence how we see problems in international agricultural trade. Polycentrism goes to the nature of the stability of the Agreement on Agriculture, whereas the question of concepts and categories concerns the way in which we represent the problem as coherent to ourselves.

Ferrari's book is a welcome addition to the still limited literature on the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) experience which, unlike any other specific response to a disease, played an important role in reshaping modern governance and consolidating key assumptions about the world around us. The ‘mad cow’ crisis began in 1986 when the unfathomable bovine brain disease was identified, but was then reignited with the shocking discovery a decade later that it could pass, and had passed, to humans despite the controls put in place. Scientific confirmation in 1996 that there was a human form of BSE led to political panic and further undermined the then exhausted Conservative Party rule. The retrospective lessons of the experience went far beyond agriculture. The problem was perceived to be one of openness and independence: perhaps government was too dependent upon lobbies and financial interests such as agriculture and, whilst utilising scientific advice, did not allow their independent voice to have influence. Less widely recognised, but even more importantly, the political lesson of the BSE experience was to henceforth tend to avoid being seen to downplay risk, based on the retrospective view that the danger could, and should, have been announced before it was scientifically confirmed. Better to overestimate even apparently limited risks than be caught again committing the now cardinal sin of downplaying them, or simply remaining silent. This is not so much a new-found principle of risk aversion as a variation on an age-old political truism of, above all, making sure that the next crisis is ‘not on my watch’.

The ‘Great Writ’ of habeas corpus has long had an iconic status as the ‘writ of liberty’ which ensured that no person could be detained in prison without being put to trial by a jury of his peers. According to the traditional version, popularised by Whiggish constitutional writers from the late seventeenth century onwards, the English constitution as embodied in the common law had, since time immemorial, striven to protect the fundamental rights of Englishmen and women, which included the right to personal liberty. The common law had supplied the writ of habeas corpus, which secured the provision of Magna Carta, that no freeman be imprisoned save by the judgment of a jury of his peers. In the course of the seventeenth century, the Whig version ran, kings with an absolutist bent sought to undermine ancient liberties, by claiming prerogative powers to imprison without trial, and by appointing supine judges who would not protect people's liberties. It took the triumph of Parliament to restore and perfect them. For William Blackstone, one of the key statutes which secured ‘the complete restitution of English liberty’ was the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, ‘that second magna carta’. As Blackstone put it: