While the concept of the ‘relational contract’ has been invoked in the courts with greater visibility and regularity in recent years, the doctrinal import of relational contract theory remains for the most part unclear to contract and commercial lawyers. This paper offers a broad framework for understanding the different ways through which relational theory might have an impact on contract doctrine going forward, and evaluates the promises and perils of doing so.

The Rana Plaza disaster of April 2013 was the most prominent of several incidents that have highlighted poor standards of business behaviour in the supply chains of well-known brands. Analysis of these incidents has attributed these poor standards to an institutional structure in which lead firms with strategic power outsource production into global value chains and pursue business models that involve rapid product upgrading and require low costs and fast turnarounds in production such as the garment industry's ‘fast fashion’ business model. This paper aims to complement that analysis by showing how trade marks, as the main legal anchors of brands, have reinforced the strategic power of lead firms, enabled them to outsource production and encouraged them to adopt business models of this kind. The paper will also evaluate the claim that brands mitigate their harmful effects by transmitting countervailing pressure back onto their owners because they provide salient targets for bad publicity and blame, as coverage of the Rana Plaza disaster showed, which can threaten their owners with reputational damage. It will be argued that this countervailing pressure has a limited effect and cannot be relied on without more to address the issues that the Rana Plaza disaster revealed.

Much has changed in the four decades since United City Merchants v Royal Bank of Canada, in which Lord Diplock established the fraud exception in transactions financed by documentary credit. In particular, the introduction of the UCP 600, case law on nullity documents and amendment to the American fraud exception justify a reconsideration of both the policy arguments underpinning Lord Diplock's rule and the fate of documents known to be forged or null at the time of presentation. Accordingly, two arguments are made in this paper. First, a consideration of the broader exception in the US should prompt a modern Supreme Court to re-examine his Lordship's insistence that a narrow exception was required to preserve the efficiency of the credit mechanism. In addition, it further argues that banks should be entitled to reject known nullities and forgeries as non-complying. This argument would reinstate the doctrine of strict compliance, which was overlooked in United City Merchants, and is based on the clarified definitions in the UCP 600, more recent judicial consideration of nullities and the existence of the ICC's International Maritime Bureau.

The Legal Services Act 2007 effected major changes in the disciplinary system for solicitors in England and Wales. Both the practice regulator, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and a disciplinary body, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, were reconstituted as independent bodies and given new powers. Our concern is the impact of the Act on the disciplinary system for solicitors. Examination of this issue involves consideration of changes to regulatory institutions and the mechanics of practice regulation. Drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality, empirical evidence drawn from disciplinary cases handled by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and the Solicitors Regulation Authority in 2015 is used to explore potentially different conceptions of discipline informing the work of the regulatory institutions. The conclusion considers the implications of our findings for the future of the professional disciplinary system.

Patient choice in the context of National Health Service (NHS) reforms in England can refer to the law and policy underpinning patient movement between the NHS and private healthcare sector (in existence since the introduction of the NHS in 1948), as well as recent competition reforms of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the National Health Service (Procurement, Patient Choice and Competition) (No 2) Regulations 2013 and the 2014 Private Healthcare Market Investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). This paper highlights the existence of two discrete, yet related frameworks: the ‘NHS patient – private patient’ framework based on Department of Health, NHS England and latterly Clinical Commissioning Group policy, and the ‘NHS patient choice’ framework, derived from New Labour choice and competition policies and subsequently enshrined by the 2012 Act reforms. The juxtaposition of these frameworks underscores the symbiotic relationship between the NHS and private healthcare, which raises questions about the fitness for purpose of current policy. It also helps explain why the competition reforms are difficult to implement, and suggests that the knitting together of patient choice and competition may unravel following the 2012 Act reforms and CMA private healthcare market development.

Proportionality has been testing the judiciary for decades. However, a single replicable model of proportionality has not been consistently applied by the courts. This paper explores the differential application of proportionality in English law. It is argued that these differential approaches create doctrinal confusion and give rise to numerous shortcomings. These shortcomings include: (i) the a priori weighting of fundamental rights; (ii) undue deference to state institutions; and (iii) variable judicial scrutiny dependent upon the source of the rights in question. It will be argued here that the courts ought to adopt a common standard of proportionality review in all proceedings concerning fundamental rights. The viability of this approach will then be tested against existing case law.

The importance of the subjects of litigation being able to tell their story directly to the decision maker is widely recognised as offering therapeutic benefits to all involved in the decision-making process. The Court of Protection makes life changing decisions for individuals on health and welfare matters, and it is clearly critical that the person at the centre of those proceedings (known as ‘P’) is given the opportunity for ‘direct engagement’ with the judge deciding their case. This paper interrogates the under-explored domain of the prevalence and forms in which ‘P’ has engaged directly with the judge (particularly by meeting with the judge without giving formal evidence) with the aid of a database of over 200 ‘health and welfare’ judgments. An integrated approach is adopted, drawing from these judgments, but also cross-referencing the far more advanced literature and case law on children meeting judges in the Family Court to explore some of the issues. This paper finds that the transplantation of practices from the Family Court to the Court of Protection has been problematic, has sometimes obscured P's direct contact with the judge in their own case, and jars with recent moves in the Court of Protection towards modelling empathetic judging and ‘standing in P's shoes’.

This paper proposes new grounds for the legal ambivalence about ‘bad character evidence’. It is suggested that errors based on such evidence are profoundly tragic in the Aristotelian sense: the defendant who previously committed crime is likely to reoffend; nevertheless, she beats the odds and refrains from further crime commission – only to then be falsely convicted based on the very odds she has almost heroically managed to beat. It is further proposed that the tragic nature of such false convictions might make them particularly unfair to the defendant. It is, however, submitted that the likelihood of errors based on such evidence is unknown and probably also unknowable. Accordingly, the maximin rule for decision in conditions of deep ignorance is applied, leading to the conclusion that exclusion is to be preferred.

This paper provides an in-depth case study of the enforcement of copyright in photographs by certain rights-owners today: freelance professional photographers who derive income from the exploitation of photographic copyright. Referring to the theoretical framework of Guido Calabresi and A Douglas Melamed, the paper reflects on the implications of the case study for the nature and function of copyright in a specific context today. Bringing the experience today into conversation with the enforcement of copyright by professional photographers in past times (the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries), the paper notes the influence of the bureaucratisation of copyright exploitation (ie exploitation through picture libraries) on legal decision making in a particular forum today: the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court Small Claims Track. The paper concludes with more general reflections on the case study's implications for the courts and copyright policy-makers today.

The high prevalence of tobacco smoking in prison, and certain aspects inherent in prison culture make smoking in that environment particularly difficult to regulate. Over the last decade, the UK government has adopted and sought to implement gradually its plan to make all prisons smoke-free nationwide. The UK Supreme Court recently ruled in Black that the Health Act 2006, which prohibits smoking in most enclosed public spaces, does not bind the Crown and consequently does not apply to public prisons. Both developments have implications for the human rights protection of smoking and non-smoking prisoners. This paper considers how English smoking and non-smoking prisoners’ (human) rights are currently protected, and what the legal implications are of a complete ban on smoking in English prisons. The paper reflects on whether an indoor smoking ban might strike a better balance between the competing rights and interests of smoking and non-smoking prisoners than a complete ban.

This paper identifies two paradigms of vicarious liability. One is an established paradigm of ‘liberal agency’ found in cases where owner-managers ‘act through’ workers, with whom they have personal relations, in undertaking work tasks. The second paradigm is found in cases concerning bureaucratic organisations, which are characterised by chains of command and variegated decision-making procedures. Courts have grounded organisational responsibility in features such as structure, hierarchy, and control, which this paper uses to construct a model of the ‘deterrable organisation’. The deterrable organisation has important capacities to effect change in behaviour that courts rely on in order to prevent worker wrongdoing. The paper tests the viability of the model against the empirical literature and argues that courts could improve outcomes by a more targeted use of powers to award remedies.

This paper presents a history of New Zealand's accident compensation scheme as a struggle between two competing normative paradigms that justify the core reform of the replacement of civil actions for victims of personal injury with a comprehensive no-fault scheme. Under ‘community insurance’, the scheme represents the community taking moral and practical responsibility for members who are injured in accidents, while for ‘compulsory insurance’ the scheme is a specific form of compulsory accident insurance. Understanding the history of the scheme in this way helps explain both the persistence of the scheme and important changes made to it by different governments.

Harmonisation and legal convergence are core tasks of the EU. This paper explores the question about the determinants for national convergence of EU law, specifically applied to the ever-growing body of European consumer sales law. The measurement of national convergence is based on a unique coding of five directives in seven Member States. Using the fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) method, the paper finds that differences in national convergence can partly be explained by favourable features of the corresponding directives; however, mainly, they are the result of a combination of domestic political factors and, to a lesser extent, the country characteristics. This has important policy implications, for instance, on the need to ‘bring in politics’ in the debate about convergence, harmonisation and consumer sales law.

This paper explains how the concept of personal data should be delimited. Certainty on this matter is crucial, as it determines the material scope of the data protection obligations. The primary boundary delimiting the scope of personal data is the requirement that personal data ‘relate to’ an individual. The courts of the UK and the EU have sought to delineate this boundary, but there are serious difficulties in the present approaches that have emerged thus far. Two possible ways forward are suggested, taking into account the implications of the direct application of the GDPR in the UK.

The norm in fitness to practise proceedings (FTPP) is that where sanctions might be imposed procedural fairness requires a court-like hearing. This paper questions that paradigm, using empirical research to focus on the FTPP to which social workers must account. Procedural fairness is a multi-faceted legitimising concept used to justify the design of decision-making processes. With FTPPs, the major justification is an ‘instrumentally’ focused model of procedural fairness which prioritises making decisions that look right, a goal which is delivered in the context of social work. But other justifications for procedural fairness are inadequately fulfilled, with in particular a ‘dignitarian’ respect not achieved due to the high levels of non-attendance by registrant social workers. Further, procedural fairness as ‘public accountability’ is undermined due to the relative lack of engagement of FTPPs with the perspective of the social work community. These findings hint that in the context of a poorly organised and resource-poor profession other hybrid forms of FTPP might have a stronger claim to procedural fairness than the court-like model.

In 2008, Lord Reed in his paper ‘Foreign precedents and judicial reasoning: the American debate and British practice’ noted the lack of full scholarly consideration of judicial comparativism in the UK. Ten years later, judicial reference to foreign judgments is still a very common phenomenon in this jurisdiction, however very little has been written about it. This paper assesses the UK Supreme Court's constitutional law jurisprudence in light of the main themes and arguments underlying the international debate concerning judicial comparativism. I argue that: (i) the use of foreign law is constitutionally legitimate where clear statutory language is respected; (ii) transferability concerns are mitigated by the interwovenness of the global common law system; and (iii) methodology concerns are mitigated by the UK Supreme Court's flexible, humble approach, which applies careful scrutiny to the foreign authorities put before it. Foreign judgments, I conclude, are never followed blindly or arbitrarily, and perhaps this is why there is no domestic debate about judicial comparativism, not even in the constitutional sphere.

The UK courts and the CJEU have often treated age discrimination as a less serious form of discrimination. This is reflected in the courts’ reluctance to offer rigorous scrutiny when evaluating whether age-differential treatment is objectively justified under anti-discrimination law. Further, a number of judges have asserted that age discrimination must be understood as different to other forms of discrimination, such as race or sex discrimination. This paper argues that age discrimination is not fundamentally different or prima facie less serious than other forms of discrimination. Age discrimination can undermine the same principles that paradigm forms of discrimination also undermine, including: creating inequality of opportunity by disadvantaging people because of a trait that is outside a person's control; undermining social equality by creating a hierarchy of social status between different groups; violating autonomy by diminishing people's capacity to have control over their lives; and communicating disrespect by conveying that particular groups have a diminished moral or social worth. It follows, contrary to the approach of much of the case law, that the courts should offer rigorous scrutiny of age-differential treatment to identify these harms and only permit age distinctions that are strictly tailored to enhance equality or other important values.