This essay seeks to shed some light on the portrayal of law and lawyers on television. Whilst it focuses principally on the British experience, it is written in the wake of American television’s extensive output and comments on these products. It indicates where the impetus for this work has come from and examines the changes in the portrayal of small screen lawyers. It notes the scholarship carried out in the United States and seeks to build on this pioneering work. It assesses the schemes used by the analysts of American TV law and notes their limited applicability to the British context. It constructs a typology of TV law programmes based on the development of distinctive styles of programming. This typology covers legal procedurals, legal dramas, legal comedies and legal reality shows. It notes the potential for analysis of the development of TV law programmes to shed light on areas such as the globalisation of culture and debates on legal education as well as on the nature and image of the legal profession and its socio-political function. It suggests that this process of mapping out the domain of small screen legal justice requires to be supplemented by detailed readings of the wealth of material which is revealed in the overview of the British experience and complemented by studies in other jurisdictions. It concludes that there seems to be a paradox at the heart of lawyer programmes. The dominant ethos of the vast majority of the material has been essentially reflective rather than refractive. The protagonists have been anti-establishment whilst the underlying trope has been the attainment of justice through the vehicle of the heroic lawyer.

Transableism is a term which refers to moving between states of being able and disabled by choice rather than by happenstance. Insofar as this may imply a choice to become dependent, claims upon the healthcare system are likely to result. In this piece we aim to explore some ethical and legal implications of such claims. In order to do so, we draw upon current debates over the place of autonomy, beneficence and paternalism in public health ethics, the taxonomy of disability and the status of persistent unexplained physical symptoms (PUPS).

The aim of this paper is to examine why public law is able to incorporate political theory but excludes feminist critiques. In order to achieve this goal a form of discourse analysis will be undertaken using epistemological and scientific perceptions of knowledge and explanation. This approach is both unusual and unique but will illustrate some of the exclusionary suppositions which underpin analysis within public law. The paper will conclude that only by adopting an alternative starting point for analysis, such as the use of concepts, will public law be able to incorporate alternative and critical approaches.

Law has to be able to respond to new or changing circumstances. This ‘legal adaptability’ may be more important than details in the ‘law as such’. However, its meaning and its significance have not yet been analysed in detail. Thus, legal adaptability will be examined in this article. It looks at the worst case scenario by discussing a fictional country (Elbonia) where legal adaptability is poor, and identifies the main adaptability criteria. By using empirical data from the three Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), it also provides an example of how to ascertain the degree of legal adaptability of particular countries.

It’s easy to miss the jokes in Kafka. Scholarship and biography have recast Kafka’s stories as self-referential parables of anomie written by a tortured neurotic who did not want to be read. In a cruelly accurate portrayal of how the academic and biographical industries can be a barrier to understanding, Alan Bennett’s play Kafka’s Dick satirises how biographical prurience over Kafka’s life has obscured the fact that he wrote simple stories, steeped in black humour, about myopic men vainly trying to do impossible things. The two books considered here – Law after Auschwitz and Darker Legacies of Law in Europe – follow Bennett’s theme. They share a desire to strip away received assumptions and counter-factual conjectures in order to explore fascist legal thought and activity on their own terms. On the way they offer interesting parallels with contemporary European law, medico-legal thought, administrative law, penal theory and so on. But, more simply, these books, like Kafka’s, recount the stories of men – self-styled members of the master race attempting to take over the world – desperate to analyse and systematise laws created by authorities who despise law. And failing. They failed to see that a war economy is not conducive to enduring legal reform. They failed to see that basing contract and criminal law on community feelings is going to be a frustrating business.