The approach taken by English courts to the duty of care question in negligence has been subject to harsh criticism in recent years. This article examines this fundamental issue in tort law, drawing upon Canadian and Australian jurisprudence by way of comparison. From this analysis, the concept of vulnerability is developed as a productive means of understanding the duty of care. Vulnerability is of increasing interest in legal and political theory and it is of particular relevance to the law of negligence. In addition to aiding doctrinal coherence, vulnerability – with its focus on relationships and care – has the potential to broaden the way in which the subject of tort law is conceived because it challenges dominant assumptions about autonomy as being prior to the relationships on which it is dependent.

This article sets out a sociological reconstruction of the constitution of the European Union (EU). Utilising a methodology derived from historical-functionalist sociology, it explains the distinctive court-led, judicial form of this constitution within a wide comparative-sociological framework, and it cites earlier examples of judicialised constitutions to elucidate the adaptive functions performed by judicial actors in the EU constitution. The article proposes a new method for analysing constitutions in general and that of the EU in particular, and it offers an encompassing sociological perspective for addressing the increasing preponderance of judicial institutions in contemporary democratic polity building.

This article considers and assesses pseudo-public spaces, considering both physical and non-physical spaces. Presenting perspectives from law, geography, architecture and communication studies, it is argued that there are links between the conditions pertaining to shopping centres, redeveloped city centres, Internet service providers and websites. Particular attention is paid to unfulfilled claims regarding the promise of new spaces, or inconsistencies as between the form and substance of a given space. The owners of pseudo-public physical spaces use legal tools such as the right to exclude from private property, while the owners of pseudo-public virtual spaces often base the relationship with a user on contractual agreements; in both cases, concepts of fundamental rights are also affected, if not often vindicated. The consequences of these approaches are assessed, drawing on critical legal geography and the history of ‘common carriers’ and other forms of regulation.

This article provides a politico-jurisprudential account of the corporate personality which develops contemporary thinking about collective and shared intentions and their practical applications. It provides a model of corporate personality that is based on recent work by Bratman, Hurley, Raz and Sugden on the issues of shared intentions, interlocking preferences, and other supporting attitudes. The article will additionally detail issues of choice, coercion and will in relation to the work of scholars such as Dworkin and Velleman.

As the many pages of law journals, monographs and textbooks demonstrate, the complex interface between law and visual culture continues to be a marginal aspect of legal study, research and scholarship. To paraphrase sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1965/1990, p. 1) there exists a hierarchy of legitimate objects of study. The orthodoxy continues to be preoccupied with the ways in which the written texts of law make the world. The multifarious gatekeepers of legal studies have responded in a variety of ways to scholarly and pedagogic projects that turn away from law's written text and its operationalisation. In my experience from giving papers and talking to lawyers and judges, these range from bewilderment, disbelief and passive aggressive indifference to more open attacks and withering denunciations that dismiss work that touches on the visual aspects of law as esoteric, trivial, ‘not law’. The publication of these three books exploring various dimensions of the interface between law and visual culture does not herald the death of the written text of law, but they do point to the long history and contemporary significance of visual culture for law. Their publication provides an opportunity to examine a body of work that takes this interface seriously. Each of these studies demonstrates the need to qualify the legal obsession with the word and for legal scholars to pay due regard to a wider range of visual cultural forms and practices that shape and represent law and legal practice. They also provide an opportunity to reflect on apparent resistance to taking the visual dimensions of law more seriously. In combination, these three monographs illustrate the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research on the visual dimensions of law and its historical range.