From the Arab Spring and Occupy to the London riots and student tuition fee protests, the disordered crowd has re-emerged as a focal point of anxiety for law makers. The paper examines two recent cases where the UK courts have thought about crowds. In Austin, the House of Lords connected the crowd to an idea of human nature. This essentialist rendering placed the crowd within an old analytical register where it is understood to release a primordial violence. In Bauer, the Administrative Court utilised a very different sense of the ‘crowdness’ of the crowd to uphold the conviction of UK Uncut activists for aggravated trespass. In their novelty and difference, these two mutually exclusive senses of the crowd open an essential question of the relation between law and society. This paper introduces the ‘Law of Crowds’ as a distinctive way to understand the questions of protest, revolt and democracy.

This paper will examine the structure of the defendant-sided unjust factors, by which I mean duress and undue influence. The paper first argues that undue influence is based on abuse of deferential trust placed in the defendant and duress on an illegitimate threat leading to the claimant's lack of consent. The paper distinguishes undue influence from the unconscionable bargains doctrine. The paper then models the effect of that on the claimant's intentional agency by reference to Michael Bratman's influential theory of intention. It suggests that while mistake can be modelled by way of the failure of a condition on his intention, meaning that the claimant's intention does not cover the facts as they actually turn out to be, defendant-sided factors are based on the defendant's having improperly inveigled himself into the claimant's practical reasoning. It suggests that this happens either by way of the defendant's illegitimate structuring of the claimant's choice or by way of the claimant's deferring his judgment to that of the defendant. The claimant's intentions have, in philosophical language, agential authority, but the claimant was ‘in the grip of a norm’; the essay explores what this concept might be.

This paper proposes a model for designing consumer dispute resolution (CDR) mechanisms (including conciliation, adjudication, arbitration and ombuds schemes). This field has expanded significantly in recent years, replacing courts as the primary forum of dispute resolution in some areas of consumer-to-business activity. This expansion has been ad hoc, with a lack of consistency in the design of CDR mechanisms and in the overall shape of the CDR landscape. In light of the recent implementation of the EU's Directive on Consumer Alternative Dispute Resolution and Regulation on Consumer Online Dispute Resolution, Dispute System Design (DSD) requires urgent attention to ensure that the design of future mechanisms is based on coherent principles. A failure to address this issue risks undermining the legitimacy of state-sanctioned dispute resolution. The model described in this paper proposes a systematic approach and aims to: synthesise existing DSD models; apply the concepts of DSD to the field of CDR; and provide a framework that may be of use in other disputing contexts.

In England and Wales, the issue of mediator immunity has not been considered by the courts or via legislation. Mediator immunity is constructed by analogy to that given to judges, but the role of the judiciary is different to that of mediators, who do not determine cases and, it is argued, do not require protection from litigation because the parties are responsible for the final settlement outcome. In Australia and the USA, mediators are usually provided with immunity in mandatory, ‘court-annexed’ programmes, although this varies from an absolute to a qualified level that is constrained by bad faith or dishonesty. In the English jurisdiction, mediation is court-connected and parties are dissuaded from accessing the courts through the risk of costs penalties or automatic referral schemes. Therefore, the time is opportune for a review of many issues involved in mediation development, including immunity. This paper considers the reasoning for extending immunity to mediators, before concluding that the subject should not be determined through legal action until after a comprehensive review of mediation developments and after a consideration of mediator standards and regulation of practice.

What is negligence? Our answers to this are frequently misleading, because we turn all our attention on to what doctrine says rather than asking how it is actually used. So we routinely talk of personal liability, even though we know very well that individuals (as opposed to organisations, typically insurers) do not pay damages. We think of negligence doctrine as if it were applied automatically and without bias, when in fact the complex insurance arrangements involved have rather decided biases. And we treat the development of the law purely as a matter of evolving judicial thought, when in fact legislatures and insurers also routinely modify the system in response to new realities. The result is that fundamental change has occurred under the very noses of theorists, who still tell us that negligence holds individual defendants responsible for their wrongdoing (it does not) or that the economic effect of tort rules is to deter defendants (there is not much reason to think this is so). Why are the leading theoretical justifications of negligence – corrective justice, responsibility theory and economic theory – so dependent on myths? Is it because the myths do not matter? Or is it that, in fact, we have no good justification for the system as it works in practice at all – we have no good theory of why negligence makes sense because it does not, in reality, make sense?

This paper aims to unravel two connected errors in the current critical position on companies. Since the financial crisis, there have been a growing number of voices in the academic community raised against the shareholder value driven corporate sector. The often conservative and highly doctrinal voices of English company lawyers have become in parts more radicalised and have found common research ground with varied academic disciplines and with company lawyers in other jurisdictions more accustomed to critical approaches. New ideas have been forged; old ideas have been rediscovered and re-examined. In the emerging networks, the neoliberal domination of the study of companies is being substantially challenged. As exciting as this is, I am concerned that critical scholars have cohered around a core claim about company law which is erroneous. Furthermore, they have largely assumed that the current economy can sustain a social agenda as well as creating profit. This, I argue, hugely underestimates entrenched problems in the economy. In unravelling these issues my aim is to reorientate challenges to shareholder primacy and to the claims of capital more generally.