天美传媒

Alan Norrie's Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice (Routledge, 2010) was jointly awarded the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize for 2010. The prize is awarded for the year's best and/or most innovative new writing in or about the tradition of critical realism.

The Committee state that Dialectic and Difference expounds and develops dialectical critical realism and brilliantly demonstrates how it trumps the irrealism of the Western philosophical tradition in general and poststructuralism in particular. It makes a significant contribution to critical realist ethical theory.

The co-winner was Christian Smith for What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

The laws which govern the marriages of the British royal family have led to heartbreak, farce and confusion, and are unfit for the twenty-first century. In an era that values human rights and free choice, there is little certainty over questions as fundamental as the effect of marrying a Roman Catholic, or of marrying without the Queen's consent. Question marks still hang over the legal basis for royal civil marriage. Obscure acts of Parliament have threatened to render members of the royal family illegitimate and prevented others from following their hearts. Drawing on a wide range of sources including once-secret files in the UK's National Archives, The Rights & Wrongs of Royal Marriage recounts episodes from the eighteenth century right down to the present day that would not look out of place in Yes, Minister or The Mikado. Professor Rebecca Probert, the leading authority on the marriage law of England and Wales, is as characteristically clear when explaining the complexities of royal marriage law as she is in her other groundbreaking studies. Her prose is concise and elegant, and full of historical anecdotes that will have royalists and republicans alike laughing aloud and wide-eyed with astonishment.

The Law Commission has just released its Report, Expert Evidence in Criminal proceedings in England and Wales. Bill O’Brian and Andrew Roberts submitted comments in response to the consultation paper and the Report acknowledges the impact of these in their analysis

The report is available online at this address:

Paul Raffield's Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution: Late-Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law - has been nominated for the Inner Temple Book Prize, awarded by the Inner Temple every 3 years for a book which has made a profound contribution to the understanding or practice of law in the United Kingdom. 

On April 1st, Professor Jackie Hodgson will deliver the opening address at Chapel Hill, UNC in the 3rd annual conference in the EU funded series The Future of the Adversarial System. For more info see

Jackie's blog

For more details of this publication click here. 

‘This book is both breathtaking in its scope and impressive in its attention to legal and institutional detail in situating developing countries in the evolving body of international economic law. Essays in this volume canvas most important areas of international economic law, including international trade law, international financial regulation, the regulation of foreign direct investment and multinational corporations, foreign aid, the enforcement of human rights standards and core international labour standards on multinational corporations, international enforcement of anti-corruption conventions, international competition law, international intellectual property rights, and international environmental law. A pervasive theme, compellingly developed, in most of these papers is the asymmetric structure of international institutions that generate rules in these various areas, in which developing countries are mostly rule takers, rather than equal participants. The current global financial crisis may provide a welcome opportunity for re-evaluating these institutional asymmetries. In any such re-evaluation, this book will provide a veritable cornucopia of constructive new insights.’
– Michael Trebilcock, University of Toronto, Canada

For more info, see

Funded by the Institute for Advanced Study at Warwick, this project is run in collaboration with colleagues from psychology and computer science.  The project will bring together academic and postgraduate colleagues in law, computer science and psychology to explore the application of new digital forensic technologies within the criminal justice context.  The aim is to develop these technologies in innovative and user-led ways, whilst also drawing on broader understandings of ethics and reliability, informed by psychology and law.  It will result in two or three interdisciplinary seminars with invited speakers and runs until July 2011.