It has long been argued that the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, now the UK Supreme Court, is characterised by Justices who are white and male, with a public school and Oxbridge education. Despite continuous debate and reflection on the lack of diversity, by academics, government and the popular press, little has changed. These debates have centred on explicit diversity, overt characteristics that are easily codified and reflect how the judiciary is seen. Drawing on the psychological theory of decision making, this paper argues that judicial decisions are subject to tacit influences that are not limited to overt characteristics. Personal values serve as one such tacit influence on decision making. Personal values are formed by life experiences and reflect many of the characteristics identified within the explicit diversity debates. However, personal values are influenced by more than simple demographic variables. This paper uses the example of personal values to highlight the fact that despite the lack of explicit diversity, there is an element of tacit diversity in the Supreme Court, which is reflected in judicial decisions. The impact of these findings serves to extend the debates surrounding diversity, highlighting the limitation of debates centred on explicit diversity alone.

The constitutional referendum is often conceptualised as the ultimate institutional expression of popular sovereignty. However, ‘direct democracy’ is viewed apprehensively by many political and legal theorists, particularly republican scholars. They argue that referendums risk engendering a dangerous ‘populism’ while detracting from the deliberative and moderating virtues of parliamentary democracy. In this paper, I defend the political value of the constitutional referendum from within republican theory, arguing that there is a misplaced focus on parliamentary supremacy within much of the literature on ‘political constitutionalism’. However, I argue it should be valued neither as a mechanism for giving expression to popular will, nor as an intervention by the mythologised ‘constituent power’ – or indeed, contra Tierney, as a ‘sovereign’ exercise in any sense. Rather, it has two main, overlapping virtues: first, its role in facilitating the contestation and checking of executive power in the area of constitutional change, and secondly, its instrumental role in fostering a wider culture of civic participation.

This paper addresses, from a socio-legal perspective, the question of the significance of law for the treatment, care and the end-of-life decision making for patients with chronic disorders of consciousness. We use the phrase ‘chronic disorders of consciousness’ as an umbrella term to refer to severely brain-injured patients in prolonged comas, vegetative or minimally conscious states. Based on an analysis of interviews with family members of patients with chronic disorders of consciousness, we explore the images of law that were drawn upon and invoked by these family members when negotiating the situation of their relatives, including, in some cases, the ending of their lives. By examining ‘legal consciousness’ in this way (an admittedly confusing term in the context of this study,) we offer a distinctly sociological contribution to the question of how law matters in this particular domain of social life.

Applying the Fairchild exception in Barker, Lord Hoffmann sought to justify apportionment of liability by reformulating the gist of the negligence action as the risk of mesothelioma rather than the mesothelioma itself. This paper examines the notion of risk to show that it cannot coherently be recognised as damage. By distinguishing risk from the related concept of probability, it is apparent that risk is a forward-looking concept that is incompatible with the role in which it is cast in the backward-looking causation inquiry when mesothelioma is an essential ingredient of liability. This paper goes on to consider whether ‘pure’ risk could form the gist of a negligence action and suggests that it lacks the moral significance to constitute damage. Furthermore, the damage requirement would be subsumed into the breach inquiry, effectively being lost as a distinct element of the negligence inquiry. This is incompatible with the traditional loss-based model of negligence.

The issue of decriminalising euthanasia and/or assisted suicide has been the subject of a number of high-profile cases, the most recent of which was the Court of Appeal decision in R (Nicklinson & Lamb) v Ministry of Justice [2013] EWCA Civ 961. This paper will focus on the offence of assisted suicide and Martin's argument that the Policy for Prosecutors in Respect of Cases of Encouraging or Assisting Suicide, issued by the DPP following the House of Lords' final judgment in R (Purdy) v DPP [2009] UKHL 45 failed to provide foreseeability where a prospective assister was not someone with an emotional connection to the requester. The success of this claim offers a fresh opportunity to examine a somewhat neglected aspect of the Policy that emanated from the Purdy case, namely its potential challenge to the oft-stated claim that motive is irrelevant to mens rea. It is my contention that the Policy has (effectively) amended s 2 of the Suicide Act 1961 by making compassion/motive a definitional element of the offence, and that this is problematic because it contravenes a limitation imposed by the maxim that supports the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy.

This paper examines the new legal framework on consumer Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) in the EU. Its primary contribution lies in identifying that harmonising the complaint submission in a pan-European Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform, and directing parties to nationally approved ADR entities that comply with minimum standards, will not fulfil the potential of an extra-judicial consumer redress system. This paper proposes key functions that the ODR platform should incorporate if it is to provide effective redress. This paper also argues that a successful ODR platform should include built-in incentives that encourage parties to: (i) participate in approved ADR processes; (ii) settle complaints with little or no intervention from neutral third parties; and (iii) ensure voluntary compliance with final outcomes.

Conflicts between domestic precedents and subsequent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights have resulted in the lower courts following prior domestic decisions even when convinced that they will be overruled on appeal. The standard interpretation of the decision of the House of Lords in Kay v Lambeth holds the lower courts to domestic precedents that are manifestly inconsistent with the subsequent Strasbourg jurisprudence and admits only the most limited exception. This paper advances an alternative approach to the relationship between the domestic courts' obligations under the Human Rights Act 1998 and the doctrine of precedent by analysis of the nature of the doctrine of precedent and the reasons offered by Lord Bingham in his leading judgment in Kay. This analysis is then extended and applied to two recent cases in which the lower courts have considered themselves bound by a decision of the UK's highest appeal court that fails to give due effect to the applicants' Convention rights.

Rankings of law schools and law journals are part of a trend towards more emphasis in academia on transparency and accountability with regard to the quality of research and education. Globalisation increases the need to compare law schools and law journals across borders, but this raises complicated questions due to differences in language, education systems, publishing style and so on. In this contribution, it is argued that ranking of law schools and law reviews runs the risk of driving us away from quality based on substance towards proceduralisation and quality assessment based on proxies favoured by managers of law schools, funding bodies and government agencies, instead of by the forum of legal scholars.