Sometimes a rule is formally equal, but the people disadvantaged by it are in fact disproportionately of a particular sex, or colour, or religion. They may be able to bring a legal challenge to the rule, on the basis that it discriminates against them indirectly; because part-time workers are disproportionately female, rules disadvantaging part-time workers have been found to be indirect discrimination against women. However, what about the male part-time worker? Can he bring no challenge? It is the nature of indirect discrimination that there will always he such atypical victims. They are persons who suffer the harm of the rule, but cannot claim that it discriminates against persons their sex, or colour, or religion. They might he the straight man disadvantaged by a rule that overwhelmingly hinders gay people, or the Christian suffering from a rule that mostly prejudices Muslims. If these ‘minority discriminees’ cannot sue, while their colleagues of a different sort can, then a new context of discrimination arises. This raises a number of surprisingly complex practical and theoretical legal problems. In the light of new European Community directives dramatically increasing the categories of prohibited indirect discrimination those problems have become more immediate. This article therefore looks at Community law, and UK arid US cases, to answer the question above. It also extrapolates the problem to multiple discrimination situations: what about a rule tending to disadvantage Muslim women, but also harming their few non-Muslim male colleagues?

The concept of home has attracted considerable critical attention in recent decades across a broad range of social science disciplines. Analysis of ‘home meanings’ provides important evidence of the values which people attach to property that they occupy as a home. This evidence could be utilised to argue that home represents a site of special significance, deserving some additional protection in law, over and above other property types. Where such arguments have been considered in English law, the tendency has been to confer special status on the family home rather than on home per se. This article identifies several weaknesses, both practical and conceptual, with the application of ‘family home’ analysis in the context of creditor/occupier disputes. The article proceeds to consider whether ‘family home’ is sufficiently attractive as a central organising concept in policy discourse to outweigh the specific criticisms outlined. An alternative and, it is argued, more desirable solution would be to approach the issue of security of tenure in the owner-occupied home from a more individualistic, rather than family-centric, perspective.

How does the European Union (EU) affect health law in its member states? Having defined ‘health law’, this article takes a multilevel governance perspective of the EU und its legal order, aid considers, through selected examples, the various modes of governance used by the EU applicable in the health law field. The article presents a spectrum of five different types of effect that the EU has on health law: strong effect from health-specific measures; strong effect from general measures; marginal effect; slow convergence effect; little prospect for effect.

In Spring 2004 the French Parliament agreed to the passing of a Bill named ‘Application of the Principle of Secularity’. The new law was brought into effect on 2 September 2004, banning all ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols in state schools and the enactment denies Muslim schoolgirls the right to wear the ‘hijab’ (or the traditional Muslim headscarf) in French public schools. The new enactment has stirred controversy within the Islamic world where many have considered the law to be an example of ‘Islamophobia’ and the West's intolerance towards the religion of Islam. This article aims to understand the historical background and the rationale of the ban on religious symbols in French state schools and seeks to examine some of the main criticisms of the new law.

Section 58 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 prohibits the use of means with intent to procure ‘miscarriage’. In Smeaton Munby J held that the administration of the ‘morning after’ pill with intent to prevent the implantation in the uterus of any embryo conceived as a result of sexual intercourse does not contravene s 58. This article respectfully questions the learned judge's decision.

This article is concerned with the portrayal of law in colonial conflict in the work of Senegalese author Sembene Ousmane, focussing in particular on the novel Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu. There Ousmane dramutises an actual strike of railway workers in 1947 in order to mount a prophetic critique of post-independence Senegal. In convening a tribunal to try strike-breakers, the workers demonstrate the constitutive, law-creating power which, Ousmane implies, still resides in newly independent peoples. This alternative legality is achieved in spite of the twin pressures of orthodox universalism, on the one hand, and passive traditionalism, on the other. As such Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu prefigures a radical, emancipatory legal pluralism in the colonial and post-colonial context.