This paper considers the impact of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. It focuses on the kind of situation presented by the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation where racist stereotypes and assumptions infect both police inquiries into serious violent crime and the treatment of victims or their families. It first demonstrates the limited scope of individual redress available prior to the Act in such situations (examining police complaints mechanisms, private prosecutions, misfeasance in public office, judicial review and negligence). It links limitations in the scope of individual redress to a traditional priority accorded to public interests. The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 gives individuals a general right to sue the police for racial discrimination in investigations. It is argued that a similar right probably now exists – at least in the context of life-threatening violence – under the Human Rights Act 1998. These developments seem to signal a shift in the balance between individual rights and the limiting claims of public interests. But the singularity of the 2000 Act is that, in introducing the mechanisms and logic of anti-discrimination law into the criminal process, it creates the potential for a more interactive relationship between individual complaint and the public interest in the collective promotion of change.

Organ retention has been with us for millennia. Walk into virtually any cathedral and many a church in Europe and you will find an array of retained organs or tissue, allegedly originally the property of assorted saints, or even of God, and almost certainly collected without proper informed consent and retained in less than secure conditions. In our own time the complexities of organ collection, retention and use have proliferated. The events at Alder Hey Children's Hospital and the debates about the ethics of biobanking all over the world have dramatically highlighted the complexity, the difficulty and the moral importance of these issues. Some of these issues have to do with the question of who can give permission for or consent to such removal and retention. Other issues involve consideration of whose rights or interests are engaged when cadaver organs and tissue are removed and retained, just what in particular is the nature, extent and force of those rights or interests, and how they are to be balanced against other moral considerations. These questions are the subject of this paper. We will not, however, here be concerned with the issues of genetic privacy, the security of genetic information.

This paper responds to John Harris's vigorous analysis of the ethical principles involved in organ retention. The author contends that Harris overlooks the context in which revelations about organ retention came about in the UK. He pays insufficient regard to deeply held cultural and religious beliefs, and does not fully address the claims of the living to determine the fate of their body after death, or the interests of bereaved families in laying a beloved relative to rest. The paper argues that the fundamental principle governing removal and retention of body parts after death must rest on a strong presumption that such body parts should be removed only with the suficient consent of the deceased or his family.

In a recent article in this journal, David Campbell and Donald Harris criticise the House of Lords decision in A-G v Blake, which held that in some circumstances there can be a liability to surrender the profits of a breach of contract to the other contracting party, ie a liability for disgorgement, as it will be referred to here. The criticism invokes what is sometimes referred to as the economic theory of efficient breach, which can be expressed briefly as follows. The performance of contracts generally increases aggregate wealth – ie is efficient – because parties will contract only on terms that provide them with a benefit that exceeds their costs of performance. But sometimes the circumstances will change after contracting, such that overall wealth will be maximised if the contract is not performed as agreed. For example, the defendant contracting party may discover an opportunity that he or she can take up only by abandoning the contract, and this opportunity may generate enough money to leave a profit, even after the claimant has been compensated for breach.

The government has made a commitment to ensure that sustainable development is placed at the heart of decision-making. The UK's strategy has primarily involved the development of voluntary measures to achieve sustainable development in policy-making. These measures are monitored by a Sustainable Development Commission and, most importantly, a parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee. However, a number of public bodies also have a statutory duty in respect of sustainable development. These duties do not create enforceable legal obligations, but may have significant value as a clear statement of policy on the achievement of sustainable development – providing political leadership at the highest level. It is essential to this aim that the government provides a clear message regarding the objective of sustainable development. However, close investigation of these duties reveals not only a partial legal framework, but a number of inconsistencies in the government's approach to the achievement of sustainable development.

This paper reconsiders images of the judge and, in particular, the position of the woman judge using fairy tale and myth. It begins by exploring the actuality of women's exclusion within the judiciary, traditional explanations for this and the impact of recent changes. It goes on to consider the image of the Herculean judge, arguing that whilst we may view him as an ideological construct, or even as a fairy tale, we routinely deny this to ourselves and to others. This both ensures the normative survival of Hercules and simultaneously constrains counter-images of judges, including that of the woman judge, who becomes almost a contradiction in terms, faced with the need to shed her difference and fit the fairy tale. Like the little mermaid, the woman judge must trade her voice for partial acceptance in the prince's world.

This image of silencing which Andersen's tale so vividly captures highlights a paradox in current discourses of adjudication. On the one hand, women judges are viewed as desirable in order to broaden the range of perspectives on the bench, thus making the judiciary more representative; on the other hand, judges are supposed to be without perspective, thus suggesting there is little need for a representative judiciary. Feminists and other commentators negotiate their way uncomfortably through this territory, acknowledging a gender dimension to adjudication, but failing fully to confront its implications. This paper seeks to ‘undress’ the judge, to flush out images of adjudication which deter or prevent women from joining the judiciary and constrain their potential within it. It highlights both the role of the imagination in existing conceptions of adjudication and the increasing necessity for a re-imagined Hercules – an alternative understanding of the judge which women and other groups currently underrepresented on the bench can comfortably and constructively occupy.

In the Belgian Linguistic case the European Court of Human Rights held that legislation regarding language in education which was based on the principle of territoriality did not offend against the rights guaranteed in Article 2 of Protocol 1 or Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, whether taken alone or in conjunction with Article 14 on non-discrimination. That ruling was given some 35 years ago, and this paper considers whether developments since then might lead the European Court of Human Rights to decide similar issues differently if they arose today. However, having considered the situation, including instruments which have been adopted specifically to deal with language rights and minority rights, the conclusion is reached that the European Court of Human Rights would be likely to continue to allow a fairly wide margin of appreciation to states in the highly sensitive and controversial area of language rights and how they should be protected.