This article explores civil society organisations’ (CSOs) participation in judicial review proceedings. This became contentious when the Ministry of Justice announced that it intended to reform the judicial review process, and suggested changes to the law on standing and third-party interventions. Ultimately, the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 did not amend the law in these areas, but has arguably made it more difficult for CSOs to engage in public interest litigation. Attempts to restrict the access of CSOs to judicial review need to be seen in the context of the shifting relationship between CSOs and the state, and differing perspectives on their function. If CSOs are to continue to take part in judicial review cases they need to justify their presence in terms of their expertise and on the ground knowledge. It is argued that deliberative, dignitarian and more general theories about the nature of civil society may well establish a basis for CSOs’ continued presence in judicial review litigation.

The internet, social media and online profiling have fundamentally changed advertising, and the regulation of gambling advertising has not yet managed to address the challenges and opportunities arising from this technological shift. Furthermore, the regulation of gambling does not take into account sufficiently the needs of children and vulnerable persons. We review the empirical research on the impact of gambling advertising and show how regulatory standards firmly adhere to the transmission theory of communication that prioritises the communicative intent of the advertiser over how the advertising message is received by or impacts on vulnerable people. This article reviews the law on gambling advertising and argues that for gambling, the restrictions imposed by the largely co-regulatory system only have limited effect. We compare the regulation of gambling advertising, by way of analogy, to a sieve that holds only a little water, and make recommendations for legal reform.

Section 1(2A) of the Children Act 1989 establishes a statutory presumption that ‘involvement’ of both parents in their children's lives after divorce or separation is in children's best interests. This paper sets out to examine what effect this had had. The aim of the legislation was to improve the transparency and clarity of judges’ reasoning. This would help to reduce the numbers of parents litigating and would placate fathers’ rights groups who were damaging confidence in the family justice system. Drawing on a sample of reported cases, this paper concludes that, at the higher levels, courts are not implementing the presumption. Nor has the presumption succeeded in placating fathers’ rights groups or significantly reducing the number of cases coming to court. It appears that the presumption has had little impact and the government's aims have not been realised. However, where it is having some impact, the presumption may be putting mothers and children at risk.

This paper addresses a straightforward question: ‘Should tort law recognise a defence of duress?’ Previous scholarship concerning this issue is thin on the ground, and the answers it supplies are demonstrably inadequate. Those who have favoured the development of a duress defence in tort have done so by analogy with criminal law where duress is, of course, well established. The rival school of thought has sought to highlight the fact that excuse defences are out of place in tort and that, therefore, there is no room for duress in tort. This paper rejects both approaches. It accepts that the criminal law is a poor source of analogy, but rejects the idea that duress must be seen as an excuse (and hence the idea that there can be no space for it in tort). It offers a fresh start based on the role of duress within tort law's sibling, the law of contract. It identifies three possible conceptions of duress in contract and then asks whether these conceptions could be used to ground a comparable defence of duress in tort by analogy. It concludes that a plausible case can be made in respect of each conception, but – given that the paper has primarily theoretical ambitions – it stops short of advocating any one conception in particular.

This paper presents the findings from the first qualitative study to consider the relationship between intersex experience and law, representing a significant contribution to a currently under-researched area of law. Since 2013 there has been a global move towards the legal recognition of intersex, with Australia, Germany and Malta all using different techniques to construct and regulate intersex embodiment. This paper is the first to compare and problematise these differing legal approaches in the legal literature. In doing so it demonstrates that many of these approaches are grounded in ideas of formal equality that lead to the entrenchment of vulnerability and fail to build resilience for the intersex community. Through engagement with the intersex community a more contextual account of substantive equality is enabled, encouraging new approaches to law and social justice. Our qualitative study revealed that prevention of non-therapeutic medical interventions on the bodies of children was understood to be the key method to achieving equality for intersex embodied people. Whilst this is the cornerstone of intersex-led legislative reform, such an approach necessitates support through a mixture of formal and substantive equality methods such as anti-discrimination law, education and enforcement procedures. This paper concludes by offering a series of recommendations to legislators capable of enabling substantive intersex equality.

This paper explores the interaction of British medical practitioners with the nascent intellectual property system in the nineteenth century. It challenges the generally accepted view that throughout the nineteenth century there was a settled or professionally agreed hostility to patenting. It demonstrates that medical practitioners made more substantial use of the patent system and related forms of protection than has previously been recognised. Nevertheless, the rate of patenting remained lower than in other fields of technical endeavour, but this can largely be explained by the public nature of medical practice during this period. This paper therefore seeks to retell the history of the exclusion of medical methods from patent protection, an exclusion whose history has produced a substantial body of scholarship. However, its aims go beyond this in that it also seeks to illuminate how medical practitioners engaged with the broader political and policy landscape in order to secure financial remuneration for their inventions. Through an exploration of how prominent doctors interacted with Parliament around claims for a financial reward, it demonstrates that doctors sought to use reputational advantage to leverage financial success and the important role that Parliament could play in that process.

The paper critically examines the consensus among tort scholars that an injured view can never be actionable in nuisance. The consensus, it is argued, is based on a problematic understanding of the permanence of early modern nuisance authority, and a neglect of modernisation in the definition of actionable injury in the nineteenth century, in response to industrialisation, urbanisation and, crucially, suburbanisation. David Sugarman's ‘textbook tradition’ provides a valuable disciplinary explanation for the mismatch between scholarly portrayals of doctrine and authoritative judicial formulations in decided cases.

Genetic information is relevant not only to the patient, but also to their family. Where a patient refuses to share that information with family members, then their legal rights may conflict. This paper focuses on that conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of third parties. We first examine the nature of the duty of confidence as it applies in these circumstances, and the extent to which it can appropriately accommodate the familial nature of genetic information. We then consider the situations in which a healthcare practitioner might owe a third-party family member a tortious duty of care. We conclude that in most cases, there will be no duty owed to third parties, but that in certain limited circumstances, a duty of care should arise.

The purpose of this article is to examine the interaction between the court and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in the legal administration of civil justice. It addresses the following questions. What is the relationship between ADR and the concept of justice? How do we make sense of the anti-ADR views, in particular the serious threat to the rule of law? What role does, and should, the court play in alternative processes? It argues that integrating ADR into the court system broadens the notion of justice and its access, and that, under the rule of law, judges should play a more central role to ensure the use, quality and integrity of alternative processes. This paper extends our understanding of the relationship among justice, ADR and the court from an internal perspective. It also points out the need to expand the case management responsibilities of judges, and their delegates in the Online Court, on ADR.