Contemporary settled democracies, including the USA, England and Wales and Ireland, have witnessed a string of high-profile cases of institutional child abuse in both Church and State settings. Set against the broader literature on transitional justice, this analysis argues that there are significant barriers to truth recovery within the particular context of historical institutional abuse by the clergy in the Republic of Ireland. In the main, it argues that the frameworks of the inquiries and commissions into historical institutional child abuse are not conducive to truth recovery or the search for justice in dealing with the legacy of an abusive past. It is the Church–State relationship which makes the Irish situation noteworthy and unique. The Catholic Church and child care institutions are especially self-protective, secretive and closed by nature, and strongly discourage the drawing of attention to any deficiencies in organisational procedures. The nature of the public inquiry process also means that there is often a rather linear focus on accountability and apportioning blame. Collectively, such difficulties inhibit fuller systemic investigation of the veracity of what actually happened and, in turn, meaningful modification of child care policies. The paper concludes by offering some thoughts on the implications for transitional justice discourses more broadly as well as the residual issues for Ireland and other settled democracies in terms of moving on from the legacy of institutional child abuse.

‘Hate’ crime has attracted intense debate, but surprisingly little has been written on how best to draft and interpret hate crime legislation. The dominant conceptual models derive from US scholarship. Although valuable, they pay insufficient attention to principles of criminal law and to how hate crime law is perceived. This paper explores these problems through a discussion of legal approaches to, and lay perceptions of, racism, as embodied in the racially aggravated offence. It proposes a model which offers a more just alternative.

The UK, as elsewhere, faces new environmental uncertainties, especially from climate change. The sustainability of the UK's existing flood loss indemnity regime in respect of property harm is threatened by factors that include greater ecological awareness on the part of policy makers, pressures to limit public commitments to flood defence, and insurers' increasing technical capacities to differentiate risk exposure across particular locations. The basis of current reliance on the commercial insurance market is called into question, as general levels of insurance availability and affordability come under threat. In turn, differential impacts from more restricted availability or terms of cover are likely increasingly to affect vulnerable individuals and communities, which will further intensify pre-existing take-up problems among particular groups. Key themes relate to issues that arise from this changing law and policy environment, including challenges to the delicate public-private balance that has underpinned the current arrangements, implications both for civil society as well as the insurance industry, and the extent to which alternative approaches might offer solutions.

This paper examines fundamental issues concerning a corporation's right to sue for defamatory attacks on its reputation, the scope of the right and the remedies available. It first outlines the opposed positions in England and Australia, respectively. It also argues that a corporation, save for a government corporation that exercises governmental functions based on markedly different rationales, should have the right to sue in defamation premised on the concept of corporate reputation as property and for the purpose of vindicating its reputation. On the question of remedies, a corporation should be entitled to recover special damages as reparation for damage to reputation provided they are proved. This paper considers, instead of presumed damages, alternative remedies for vindicating corporate reputation. Finally, it examines the business and non-business reputations of both trading and non-trading corporations in relation to claims for damages.

This article considers the implications for higher education (HE) of the removal of the retirement age in 2011. It starts with an exploration of findings from empirical research which looked at the use of the retirement provisions of the 2006 Age Regulations in the UK HE sector. It highlights a number of concerns identified as a result of that research relating to retirement practices in HE and considers how these might apply given the recent abolition of a mandatory retirement age. The article uses a legal empirical approach to explore how the law would apply to any employer in HE attempting to justify continued use of mandatory retirement. It also examines other options such as the use of incentives to retire, the use of flexible working and the increased use of performance management. The article begins with an introduction to the main findings of the research, before turning to consider the current case-law relating to the legality of retirement provisions, including the recent Supreme Court decision in Seldon v Clarkson Wright and Jakes, and the legal implications of alternative options for managing extended working lives.

This paper interrogates the predisposition in favour of informal, low-intervention control styles of enforcement advocated by the ‘better regulation’ movement, and which resonates throughout the Hampton Report recommendations which are currently being implemented in the UK. It focuses on three practices that reflect the trend towards diverting regulatory enforcement action away from the courts in favour of reliance on formal administrative sanctioning powers ranging from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’: the use of negotiated penalty settlements, the acceptance of administrative undertakings (‘enforcement undertakings’) and the provision of firm-specific compliance advice by regulators. Each practice is explored through various analytical lenses which enable the underlying constitutional tensions to be identified and interrogated. In so doing, it demonstrates how the emphasis on bargaining, negotiation and discussions between regulators and those they are responsible for regulating advocated by the UK better regulation movement may antagonise several constitutional values, including transparency, accountability, due process and participation, as well as several values associated with formal conceptions of the rule of law. On the other hand, resort to negotiation and discussion in regulatory enforcement can generate important benefits, largely in facilitating the timely, creative and cost-effective resolution of enforcement disputes while avoiding the formality, delay and hostility associated with formal court adjudication. This ‘clash of logics’ can be traced to inherent differences between bargaining, on the one hand, and adjudication on the other. Bargaining and adjudication represent two quite different and distinct forms of ordering through which disputes can be resolved, and it is these differences that lie at the foundation of their respective virtues and shortcomings when employed to resolve disputes concerning regulatory violations.