The current relationship between UK and Strasbourg is politically fraught, which presents inevitable challenges for both jurisdictions. This article will analyse how the Strasbourg Court has responded to these challenges when dealing with applications against the UK, particularly when an application is brought following determination by the UK Supreme Court. It will be argued that there is some evidence that the Strasbourg Court has recently been using the admissibility stage as a novel site for effecting strategic behaviour, in order to moderate and influence UK–Strasbourg relations. The effect of this recent inclination, and some possible justifications for it, will then be set out.

On 7 June 2018, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (UKSCt) issued its decision on, inter alia, whether Northern Ireland's near-total abortion ban was compatible with the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). This article critically assesses the UKSC's treatment of international law in this case. It argues that the UKSCt was justified in finding that Northern Ireland's ban on abortion in cases of rape, incest, and FFA was a violation of Article 8, but that the majority erred in its assessment of Article 3 ECHR and of the relevance of international law more generally.

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.

This paper examines judicial leadership on the UK Supreme Court. It does not confine itself to the formal roles of the President and Deputy President. Rather, building on existing categories of judicial leadership, including administrative, jurisprudential and community leadership, it considers the contributions of all 12 Justices. In so doing, it provides a significant compilation of quantitative data on the activities of the Justices of the Supreme Court both on and off the bench from the the Court's inception in 2009 to the end of the 2014-2015 legal year. From this, we suggest that while a number of the Justices engaged in one or two broad forms of leadership – with Lady Hale in particular demonstrating a substantial degree of leadership across all three dimensions – at the other end of the spectrum, at least on the measures used in this paper, a significant minority did not. In the light of this, and the significant number of recent and forthcoming retirements from the Court, the paper concludes by considering the implications of our findings for the future of the Court. We argue that these retirements will result in gaps in both formal and informal judicial leadership, and it is vital that these gaps are filled by appointees who are capable of, and prepared to step up to, diverse and varied forms of judicial leadership.

The role of the UK Supreme Court (UKSC) as conventionally understood is to give effect to, and not to challenge, the will of Parliament. At the same time, the UK's constitution forces the UKSC to develop a constitutional jurisprudence to resolve clashes of higher-order principles, for instance between parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. This development puts the legitimacy of unelected and unaccountable judges invalidating legislation under the spotlight. Instead of arguing for US-style strike-down powers, I argue that cautious and corrective judicial intervention is constitutionally mandated and democratically legitimate.

United Kingdom – UK Supreme Court – European Union – The orthodox view of the British constitution: lack of hierarchy of laws – Britain's ‘unwritten’ constitution and the role of ‘constitutional statues’ in Factortame – HS2 judgment makes up for House of Lords' omission in Factortame – Relationship between parliamentary sovereignty and EU law more clearly articulated – A normative-hierarchical constitutional order

On 16 December 2009, the UK Supreme Court held a state-funded Jewish school to be guilty of discrimination based on ethnic origin in the way it operated its admissions policies. The Jewish Free School (JFS), one of the top-performing schools in the country, refused a place to a thirteen year old boy, M., because it did not consider him Jewish. It is a fundamental tenet of traditional Judaism that to be Jewish one must be born of Jewish mother or to a woman who converted into Judaism prior to his/her birth. M.'s father was Jewish by birth, but his mother, who was originally an Italian Catholic, had converted to Judaism with the criteria set by a non-orthodox branch of Judaism. The School's admissions standards only recognized orthodox criteria for conversion as valid, hence deeming neither M. nor his mother to be Jewish.