The European Convention on Human Rights allows its Contracting Parties to submit third-party interventions. This paper analyses the reasons for engagement of the states with the European Court of Human Rights beyond what they are strictly expected to do: respond in contentious cases and execute judgments. It is argued here that the states mainly engage with the Court for the purposes of self-interest. This paper fills the gap in the literature by substantiating this claim using empirical methods of content analysis of the case law and research interviews with the governmental representatives. Finally, this paper looks at the impact of third-party interventions on the Court's reasoning and concludes that the Court is aware of the aims of the national governments and bears those aims in mind.

This paper investigates the knowledge of the general public on the legislative framework relating to wildlife conservation in England, with a specific focus on the Bern Convention and the public's awareness of the treaty, as well as the domestic legislation transposing it. By creating a publicly available survey, the study determined the environmental attitudes of the public and their knowledge of the legislative regime relating to wildlife conservation. Whilst the majority of the public displayed pro-environmental attitudes and support for greater efforts towards the conservation of flora and fauna, the overall awareness of the legislation was worryingly low, with only 5.6% of respondents recognising the Bern Convention. Accordingly, the study investigated how awareness of environmental legislation may be increased. Ultimately, the paper concludes that formal environmental education, including legislation, must be optimised, and the domestic legislative framework should be further consolidated.

Tasked with enforcing criminal law, public prosecutors worldwide enjoy broad discretion. Existing literature on prosecutorial discretion and accountability tends to discuss the regulation of prosecutorial discretion or analyse the influence of the procedural environment in which public prosecutors operate. This paper focuses on occupational culture as an important factor affecting prosecutorial decisions. It draws particular attention to an understudied aspect of prosecutors’ professional identity: legitimacy and, specifically, self-legitimacy, ie the belief public prosecutors have in their own legitimacy to make decisions in individual cases. The paper presents research findings from direct observations and interviews which reveal a sense of a loss of self-legitimacy amongst Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) staff due to the constant monitoring of their decisions by colleagues and managers. This all-pervasive managerialism, paradoxically, undermines the very legitimacy (and, relatedly, transparency) which the CPS has had to work so hard to develop since its inception.

The nature of separate legal personality is a perennial debate in corporate law. This paper uses insights from a previous iteration of the debate to argue that separate legal personality is best seen as a two-step process: it is a concession from the state to something real. That real thing is the economic concept of the firm, which has been recently debated within institutional economics. Viewing separate legal personality as a two-step process lets us explore whether the concession of separate legal personality is operating as it should. Law imposes no prerequisite requirement that a firm exists before establishing a company, nor limits firms to only one company. Law thus facilitates misalignments between the firm and the company. Such misalignments will only occur if two constituencies within the company structure – the ultimate shareholders and directors – consider it in their interests to create such misalignment. As a result, these misalignments harm third parties by allowing risk to be exported to them through opportunistic misalignment. This paper then explores the methods of misalignment and reviews current legal tools which are available to be deployed to re-align the company to the firm, and argues that they should be deployed.

The role of the state has been underplayed in scholarship on global health. Taking a historical view, this paper argues that state institutions, practices and ideologies have in fact been crucial to the realisation of contemporary global health governance and to its predecessor regimes. Drawing on state theory, work on governmentality, and Third World approaches to international law, it traces the origins of the ‘health state’ in late colonial developmentalism, which held out the prospect of conditional independence for the subjects of European empires. Progress in health was also a key goal for nationalist governments in the Global South, one which they sought to realise autonomously as part of a New International Economic Order. The defeat of that challenge to the dominance of the Global North in the 1980s led to the rise of ‘global governance’ in health. Far from rendering the state redundant, the latter was realised through the co-option and disciplining of institutions at national level. To that extent, the current order has an unmistakably imperial character, one which undercuts its declared cosmopolitan aspirations, as evidenced in the approach to vaccine distribution and travel bans during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Disputes relating to cryptoassets have proliferated in recent years, along with the rise of the cryptoasset market. Some of these can be resolved using traditional principles of contract, tort or trust law, but proprietary issues raise particular conundrums. While cryptoassets have generally been accepted to be property, that is merely the starting point. To properly resolve proprietary disputes, it is necessary to provide a reasoned and robust explanation for why particular rules of title originally developed in the context of tangible property should apply. In turn, two foundational questions must be answered. First, what is the subject-matter of the property right in cryptoassets? And secondly, what is the proprietary effect of a blockchain transaction? These issues have received relatively little attention in the literature, which has focused on whether cryptoassets are property at all, and existing contributions (including the Law Commission's recent Consultation Paper on Digital Assets) which do engage these issues are far from reaching consensus. This paper critically examines those views and puts forward its own reasoned approach for the application of traditional rules of title to cryptoassets.

This paper evaluates the wide discretion afforded to planning decision-makers in England. It does so in respect of a key but often overlooked question in the transition to renewables: whether developers/owners of onshore wind projects should be required to provide a ‘bond’ to ensure decommissioning and site restoration (DSR) occurs. Bonds are financial instruments that evidence ability to fund DSR. They help avoid legacy issues (eg project abandonment) but carry a long-term cost burden for developers/owners. A study of 275 projects elicits three issues. First, a lack of government guidance on bonding, vague ‘threshold’ terms in law and policy and failure of planning decision-makers to consider how others had decided the question result in a lack of markers to inform discretion, with bonds being rare (present in only 15.6% of projects) and their stringency inconsistent. Secondly, this lack of markers legitimises risky, cost-saving practices prohibited in offshore wind, where government guidance informs bonding decisions. Thirdly, reasons for decisions are weak or absent, inhibiting achievement of the justifications for their provision in an administrative context (eg disciplining decision-making). Whilst discretion enhanced capacity to generate electricity from wind through enabling a reduction of market entry costs, assisting movement towards renewable energy targets, it resulted in abandonment risk being ignored. This mirrors strategies adopted elsewhere in England's energy sector, such as coal and oil and gas, where a ‘light touch’ approach to bonding has, traditionally, been deployed to avoid hindering project development.

Associate Hospital Managers (AHMs) are members of the local community with a power under section 23 of the Mental Health Act 1983 to discharge people from compulsory mental health care against medical advice. They provide scrutiny of professional decisions and, in so doing, protect patient liberty by providing review of compulsory care. Abolition of the AHMs has been contemplated on numerous occasions, most recently by the Independent Review of the Mental Health Act 1983 (December 2018), the White Paper on ‘Reforming the Mental Health Act’ (January 2021) and the Government's response (July 2021). Through an historical and contemporary consideration of the section 23 power spanning 1808–2022, this paper argues that removal of the AHMs would be detrimental to the legitimacy of the 1983 Act. This is because the abolition of the AHMs would undermine the principles of local, democratic, community oversight entailed by section 23, and found nowhere else in the Act. The Draft Mental Health Bill (June 2022) does not address these concerns.

This paper sets out the true ambit of section 126 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974, noting that it requires virtually all residential mortgage agreements to be enforced by court order. Despite this, numerous commentaries on the English law of mortgage omit reference to section 126. The implications of our findings are profound. Not least, many accounts of the law of mortgage will require substantial revision, including recognition of the fact that cases such as Ropaigealach v Barclays Bank plc and Horsham Properties Group Ltd v Clark were reversed as long ago as 2008. More significant is the need to ensure that accurate knowledge of section 126 is conveyed to those who advise mortgagors at risk of possession. This is particularly the case given the ‘cost of living crisis’ and the backlog of possession claims arising out of the Covid-19 pandemic. Any mortgagees tempted to expedite recovery of mortgaged property by enforcing the mortgage extra-judicially should be directed to section 126 and the requirement it imposes to obtain a court order.