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.

Substantial numbers of criminal offences are created in the UK in delegated legislation, often carrying heavy maximum penalties. The majority are created in statutory instruments passed under the negative resolution procedure, which offers very limited opportunity for scrutiny and does not involve a parliamentary vote. This phenomenon has slipped under the radar of orthodox criminal law scholarship, where debate has focused primarily on the criteria that should be used to determine the content of the criminal law and on the principles to which such offences should conform, rather than on the process of creating criminal offences. Creating offences in delegated legislation raises questions of democratic legitimacy and has resulted in criminal offences being created which do not conform to basic principles of fair notice and proportionality of penalty. To address this, we propose that parliamentary approval should be required for all serious offences. It would be impractical to do this for all criminal offences, and direct participation in the legislative process via consultation can act as an alternative (or additional) legitimating principle. This does, however, require that the consultation process complies with certain basic minimum requirements, and we explain how these requirements might appropriately be framed.

Vicarious liability has a greater reach within both professional and amateur football than previously thought. The newly-expanded doctrine has opened up vicarious liability for amateur players, and within grassroots teams. A greater range of torts may also now trigger vicarious liability, such as acts of on and off-pitch violence. The Football Association will need to review the scope of the National Game Insurance Scheme, which significantly lags behind this expanded exposure to vicarious liability.

Examining vicarious liability in the context of football also reveals significant problems with the current approach to vicarious liability within unincorporated associations. This category developed in the context of institutional abuse within highly-organised religious institutions; it does not mean that this category of vicarious liability should be applied to grassroots sporting organisations in the same way. For instance there is scope to apply a different test at stage two. It is argued that the courts will need to tighten up this category so as not to unnecessarily expose members of grass roots organisations to vicarious liability which is able to be executed against their personal assets. Both amateur and professional clubs may also wish to carefully consider their selection of players.

Judges are increasingly asked to decide whether a rule of national law is applicable to a cyberspace actor who is not present in their jurisdiction, or whose activities do not clearly fall within the established understanding of the rule. They do this through interpreting the applicability and meaning of the law.

Every attempt to enforce a national law makes a claim that the law has authority over the cyberspace actor. By accepting that claim, the judge asserts that the law's claim is legitimate. This is a Hartian exercise, adopting the internal view of the national legal system as the test for legitimacy.

But in cyberspace the legitimacy of a national law claim is determined not by the internal perspective of the legal system but by the external perspective of cyberspace actors. A law will only have authority in cyberspace if it can convince cyberspace actors that its claim is legitimate. And a legal system which repeatedly makes illegitimate claims thereby weakens its status as a system which adheres to the rule of law.

Judges can help solve this problem by interpreting laws and applying public and private international law so as to reject applicability claims which are illegitimate. To do this successfully, they need to understand the jurisprudential foundations of any law's authority in cyberspace.

Contemporary British counter-terrorist legislation is dominated by ‘counter-law’ in Richard Ericson's terms: by using law against law, it systematically undermines the rule of law. This paper supports this proposition by developing a detailed ‘archetypal’ account of the rule of law considered as a critical ideal, drawing on Fuller's ‘morality of law’. The rule of law is identified with four tendencies in law – towards greater universality, knowability, followability and justifiability – and ‘counter-law’ with tendencies to block or reverse all of these. Counter-law tendencies in contemporary counter-terrorist legislation are discussed in detail, with particular reference to the proliferation of inchoate, preparatory and situational offences. This critique is also related to contemporary debates on law and counter-law; it is argued that critiques which relativise or historicise the liberal model of the rule of law fall short by failing to engage with it on its own terms, thereby undervaluing its utility as a normative resource. The paper concludes by discussing the range, significance and gravity of the departures from the rule of law that have been identified, considering some counter-arguments and drawing conclusions for policy-makers and legal scholars.

This paper seeks to relate strategic themes in water resources management to the practicalities of imposing particular regulatory measures on water uses and to protect aquatic ecosystems. Specifically, a contrast is drawn between the global imperative of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and the sectoral (issue-by-issue) approach to water regulation that has traditionally prevailed in both regional (EU) and national legislation. The intuitive attractions of ‘integration’ are contrasted with the challenges of interrelating this to the diverse purposes for which water legislation is adopted, both for human needs and for ecological purposes. These challenges are well illustrated in the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) which purports to adopt an ‘integrated’ approach, but is actually concerned with water quality, largely to the exclusion of other water-related concerns. Insofar as the Directive does seek to secure integration between water quality and water quantity concerns in surface water, this is only done in a secondary or incidental way. Water flow becomes relevant only where specified environmental objectives under the Directive are not being met. However, the legally contingent status of flow has been bolstered markedly by recent guidance on ecological flows under the WFD Common Implementation Strategy. The significance of this guidance is discussed and related to the implementation challenges that it raises. In relation to the UK, and particularly England, it is argued that the response to addressing water flow issues arising under the WFD had been dilatory and inadequate. Concluding observations reflect on the global, regional and national challenges to integration of water legislation as they have been illustrated by the discussion of regulating for ecological water flows.

In this paper we explore a case for judicial review brought against the Secretary of State for International Development by an Ethiopian national, Mr O. The claimant alleged that the Department for International Development (DfID) had failed adequately to assess evidence of human rights violations in Ethiopia to which funds provided by DfID had contributed. Warby J ruled that the claim merited a full hearing. DfID is unaccustomed to judicial review: the O case is the first time since the 1995 Pergau Dam case that UK development aid has been reviewed by the courts. We study Warby J's judgment and its implications for accountabiity for aid decisions. We argue that both the wider context for aid and the legal framework governing development assistance have changed significantly in the 20 or so years since Pergau. In particular, we show that despite the UK's new legal commitment, made in 2015, to spend 0.7% of gross national income (GNI) on official development assistance, the existing mechanisms for scrutinising aid decisions are inadequate. We argue that there is an accountability gap in relation to the UK's now considerable development spending and explore the role of judicial review in this context.