天美传媒

Professor Gary Watt delivered the inaugural Madam Justice Mary Southin Lecture at the  

Endowed by her friends and colleagues, the annual Madam Justice Mary Southin Lecture pays tribute to Madam Justice Southin's many contributions to the development of the common law in British Columbia. It is to address either the Law of Equity or British Columbia legal history, and it alternates between the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria Law Faculties.

Professor Watt’s lecture was entitled:

Kimberley Brownlee

Kimberley was awarded a £37,000 Philip Leverhulme Prize. These prizes are designed to recognise and facilitate the work of outstanding young research scholars, who are making original and significant contributions to knowledge in their field with an international impact, and whose greatest achievements are expected to be still to come.

Kimberley Brownlee's research during her fellowship will focus on social human rights, and in particular the idea of a human right against social deprivation. The term ‘social deprivation’ refers to a persisting lack of minimally adequate opportunities for decent human contact and social inclusion. Social deprivation is a common experience in arenas of institutional segregation such as long-term medical quarantine and solitary confinement. It is also the most extreme variant of a more general, pervasive phenomenon of social isolation that includes people, many of whom are elderly or disabled, who are chronically, acutely lonely and unable to remedy their situation. This kind of deprivation is an important concern, particularly in western societies, given the individualistic bent of western culture, aging populations, and the ongoing use of isolating procedures in medicine, immigration, and criminal justice.

The Legal Regulation of Cohabitation examines hundreds of reported and unreported cases, as well as legislation, policy papers, debates in Parliament to show how the legal treatment of cohabiting couples has been transformed over the past four centuries – from punishment as fornicators in the seventeenth century to eventual acceptance as family in the late twentieth century.

Alongside this, drawing on thousands of newspaper reports and magazine articles, it charts how the language used to refer to cohabitation has changed over time – from the denunciatory phrases of the early part of the period, through the namelessness of cohabitation in the nineteenth century, wartime ‘unmarried wives’, the ‘living in sin’ of the mid-twentieth century, the ‘stable illicit unions’ of the Law Commission’s 1966 report on divorce, the ‘common-law wives’ of the 1970s, the ‘live-in lovers’ of the 1980s and early 1990s to the ‘partners’ of today.

These different terms both influenced and were influenced by policy debates and public perceptions of cohabitation. Law and language were also intertwined with the third key theme of the book – a reassessment of the incidence of cohabitation in past times. Having carried out innovative cohort studies of over 5,000 couples, the book provides new and more accurate evidence of the extent (or rather the rarity) of cohabitation in earlier centuries. For more information go to:

Progressive Corporate Governance for the 21st Century is a wide ranging and ambitious study of why corporate governance is the shape that it is, and how it can be better. The book sets out the emergence of shareholder primacy orientated corporate governance using a study of historical developments in the United Kingdom and the United States. Talbot sees shareholder primacy as a political choice made by governments, not a ‘natural’ feature of the inevitable market. She describes the periods of progressive corporate governance which governments promoted in the middle of the 20th century using a close examination of the theories of the company which then prevailed. She critically examines the rise of neoliberal theories on the company and corporate governance and argues that they have had a negative and regressive impact on social and economic development. In examining contemporary corporate governance she shows how regulatory styles as informed and described by prevailing regulatory theories, enables neoliberal outcomes. She illustrates how United Kingdom-derived corporate governance codes have informed the corporate governance initiatives of European and global institutions. From this she argues that neoliberalism has re-entered ex command transition economies through those United Kingdom and OECD inspired corporate governance Codes over a decade after the earlier failed and destructive neoliberal prescriptions for transition had been rejected. Throughout, Talbot argues that shareholder primacy has socially regressive outcomes and firmly takes a stand against current initiatives to enhance shareholder voting in such issues as director remuneration. The book concludes with a series of proposals to recalibrate the power between those involved in company activity; shareholders, directors and employees so that the public company can begin to work for the public and not shareholders.

Together with colleagues in four other EU states, Professor Jackie Hodgson has been awarded a European Commission Action grant of €375,000 for the project: Protecting Young Suspects in Interrogations: A Study on Safeguards and Best Practice. The objective of this two year project is to strengthen the protection of young suspects during interrogation by the police in the EU. The project consists of a comparative empirical study of the different legal procedural safeguards in place in Belgium, England and Wales, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. Based on these findings, this will be followed by professional training and recommendations for minimum EU rules and best practice.

The study follows on from Professor Hodgson’s current EU funded project, an empirical study of the procedural rights of suspects in police detention in the EU, leading to best practice recommendations.

Excellent technical writing on corporation tax abounds but it tends to be inaccessible to public lawyers, political theorists and political economists. Although recent years have seen not only an explosion in public law scholarship, but also a reawakening of interest in interpretative political theory and political economy, the potential of these perspectives to illuminate the corporation tax debate has remained unexplored. In this important work, John Snape seeks to reconcile these disparate strands of scholarship and to contribute to a new way of understanding and conceptualising the reform of the law relating to corporate taxation. Drawing on important developments in public law scholarship, the study combines elements of political theory and political economy. It advances a new interpretation of corporation tax law as an instrument of rule, through the maximisation of a nation’s economic potential. Snape shows how corporate taxation belongs at the centre of any discussion of economic globalisation, not only because of the potential of national tax systems to influence inward investment decisions but also because of the potential of those decisions to shape the public interest that those tax systems might embody. Following public law and politics models, the book looks afresh at the impact of Britain’s political institutions, of the processes of its representative government and of the theory that moulds and orders the values that the corporation tax code contains. This is a timely exploration of cutting-edge issues of public policy.

Rebecca Probert has been shortlisted for a prize in the 2011 Family Law Awards. The Family Law Awards 2011 will be hosted by Clive Coleman and are an opportunity to celebrate and recognise the many successes and outstanding achievements of family law practitioners. They are an opportunity for Family Law and its readers to acknowledge the hard work and commitment throughout the year among the nominees and the profession as a whole.

The Awards will take place on 18 October 2011 at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, London.
For more details of this award see the link below.

Kathryn McMahon has been appointed an Associate Editor of a new journal Global Journal of Comparative Law which will publish its inaugural issue in 2012.

Debt Restructuring, Oxford University Press, 2011, Rodrigo Olivares-Caminal, John Douglas, Randall Guynn, Alan Kornberg, Sarah Paterson, Dalvinder Singh, and Hilary Stonefrost, Edited by Nick Segal and Look Chan Ho

520 pages | 246x171mm

978-0-19-957969-3 | Hardback | 14 April 2011

Price: £155.00

Professor Jackie Hodgson has been awarded €330,000 by the EU Commission for an empirical project examining the procedural rights of suspects in police custody in the UK, France and the Netherlands. The study will be conducted over 2 years together with partners at the University of Maastricht, University of West of England, Justice, the Open Society Justice Initiative and Avon & Somerset Police. It will assist in the successful implementation of EU measures in this area - notably the right to custodial legal advice - and will establish practice-oriented training materials.