Birds Behaving Badly: The Regulation of Seagulls and the Construction of Public Space

This article is about the socio‐legal construction of one of the least‐loved birds in the United Kingdom: the ‘seagull'. In particular, it is about how the gull has been brought within the realm of the ‘anti‐social', in a context in which urban‐nesting gulls (of which there are many in the United Kingdom) are cast as causing a great deal of public nuisance, ranging from noise, aggression, and mess, to attacks, injuries, and stress. The article examines the measures adopted by local authorities to regulate the gull population – and to regulate people, in the name of regulating gulls – and shows how a construction of the ‘seagull’ underpins and justifies this regulatory framework. It argues that the story of the regulation of seagulls in the United Kingdom is also a story about the construction of public space, to the point that the measures adopted here challenge the very idea of public space.     

The Regulation of Xenotransplantation in the United Kingdom After UKXIRA: Legal and Ethical Issues

Xenotransplantation - the transfer of living tissue between species - has long been heralded as a potential solution to the severe organ shortage crisis experienced by the United Kingdom and other 'developed' nations. However, the significant risks which accompany this biotechnology led the United Kingdom to adopt a cautious approach to its regulation, with the establishment of a non-departmental public body - UKXIRA - to oversee the development of this technology on a national basis. In December 2006 UKXIRA was quietly disbanded and replaced with revised guidance, which entrusts the regulation of xenotransplantation largely to research ethics committees. In this article we seek to problematize this new regulatory framework, arguing that specialist expertise and national oversight are necessary components of an adequate regulatory framework for a biotechnology which poses new orders of risk, challenges the adequacy of traditional understandings of autonomy and consent, and raises significant animal welfare concerns. We argue for a more considered and holistic approach, based on adequate consultation, to regulating biotechnological developments in the United Kingdom.     

Regulatory Domain and Regulatory Dexterity: Critiquing the UK Governance of ‘Fracking’

This article provides a critique of the UK government's regulatory response to ‘fracking’. It shows how government has adopted two distinct schemas of regulation, which may usefully be classified under the headings ‘regulatory domain’ and ‘regulatory dexterity’. These schemas rely on very different interpretive conventions and are in many ways contradictory. Yet, government uses both ‘domain’ and ‘dexterity’ arguments simultaneously in order to advance its policy in favour of fracking. The article explains how two seemingly different regulatory approaches work together towards the same policy goal, and highlights the role of law in facilitating technological development.     

Disability Discrimination Law in the United Kingdom and the New Civil Rights History: The Contribution of Caroline Gooding

This article concerns the theoretical and practical contribution of radical lawyer, feminist, and disability activist, Caroline Gooding to disability rights in the United Kingdom. It assesses the impact of her published work in the 1990s and translation of her insights into practice through her work on the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and later at the Disability Rights Commission, not least in securing in legislation a positive disability equality duty. In particular, it seeks to situate Gooding's contribution within the ‘new civil rights history’, with its emphasis on the role of lawyer as mediator, facilitator, and ‘gatekeeper’. It argues that through her engagement with strategic law enforcement, law reform, and the wider mobilization of the law, Gooding created ‘alternative visions and accounts’ of disability and so forged a decisive connection between disabled people as a social movement and the law, in ways of exemplary value to social movements more generally.     

Regulating‐for‐Welfare: A Comparative Study of “Regulatory Welfare Regimes” in the Israeli,British, and Swedish Electricity Sectors

The regulatory state and the welfare state are two institutions that are central to the analysis of the characteristics of capitalist democracies. The regulatory state is seen as focused on market failures and trust‐busting, while the welfare state is said to shield citizens from the negative redistributive effects and externalities of the market. This article explores the relations and boundaries between the welfare state and the regulatory state in the electricity sectors in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Israel. It demonstrates the emergence of social policy within the context of liberalized, privatized, and (de)regulated electricity sectors. This article finds that the boundaries between the regulatory state and the welfare state are blurred in Israel and the United Kingdom but not in Sweden. These findings may imply a connection between the welfare state and the regulatory state, suggesting that a strong welfare state is needed in order to maintain regulation‐for‐competition.     

Universal Credit, ‘Positive Citizenship’, and the Working Poor: Squaring the Eternal Circle?

This article examines the potential effects of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 on the United Kingdom social security system, and on claimants. This legislation illustrates new modes of thought and ideology underlying the British welfare state. The introduction of the ‘Universal Credit’ has the potential to solve the ‘poverty trap’, where claimants are better off in receipt of welfare benefits rather than engaging with employment, and may assist low‐paid individuals into ‘positive’ citizenship. However, the practicalities of implementing Universal Credit might undermine legislators’ ambitions. It may be that the Act attempts too much reform to the social security system, trying to impose legislative uniformity on a highly complex set of socio‐economic circumstances which may be impervious to such rationalisation. This could result in the scheme requiring further reform, or even abolition. The ideological and historical underpinnings of Universal Credit are also examined to understand more clearly its nature and structure.     

Socio‐legal Studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand

This article reviews the development and impact of the socio‐legal field in New Zealand. It begins by assessing the socio‐legal presence within teaching and research conducted across New Zealand's law faculties before analysing factors likely to inhibit future growth of the sub‐discipline in this remote jurisdiction. Having examined how New Zealand's legal scholars map and influence national legal behaviour, without always recognizing contradictions between these objectives or categorizing their research as ‘socio‐legal’, the article goes on to examine how the next generation of socio‐legal researchers might exert stronger influence over the law curriculum and new areas of legal policy. In conclusion, it argues for a distinctive New Zealand approach toward socio‐legal studies and notes that future prospects appear encouraging, and in certain respects more promising than those in the United Kingdom, particularly when considering research impact.     

Riders on the Storm: Wales,the Union,and Territorial Constitutional Crisis

The United Kingdom continues to undergo a rapid process of constitutional change, with an ongoing redistribution of law‐making and governmental powers to different parts of the Union under an expanded rubric of ‘devolution'. This article illuminates a pervasive sense of territorial constitutional crisis and opportunity in the most recent period, familiarly associated with, but not confined to, Scotland. Constructive and flexible federal‐type responses inside a famously uncodified constitution are championed. Wales, commonly treated as a junior partner in the United Kingdom, presents special challenges for constitutional and legal analysis and distinctive perspectives on the Union which have not received the attention they deserve. In tackling this deficiency, the article elaborates a ‘new Union’ concept of a looser and less hierarchical set of constitutional arrangements in which several systems of parliamentary government are grounded in popular sovereignty and cooperate for mutual benefit.     

EMU and the Shift in the European Labour Law Agenda: From ‘Social Policy’ to ‘Employment Policy’

This article examines the interaction between EMU and the European Union (EU) employment strategy and its implications for law. It focuses on the importance of EMU as a catalyst in the development of the EU's social and employment policy in the years following the Treaty on European Union in 1992, up to the inauguration of a new employment policy in the Treaty of Amsterdam. In analysing the EU's discourse on labour market regulation, it is arguable that a shift has occurred in the EU's position on the ‘labour market flexibility’ debate: that the EU institutions are more readily accepting of the orthodoxy that labour market regulation and labour market institutions are a major cause of unemployment within EU countries and that a deregulatory approach, which emphasises greater ‘flexibility’ in labour markets, is the key to solving Europe's unemployment ills, along with macroeconomic stability, restrictive fiscal policy and wage restraint. As the EU's employment strategy has matured, this increased emphasis on employment policy has come to displace discourses around social policy. This change in emphasis has important implications for EMU since it signals a re‐orientation from an approach to labour market regulation which had as its core a strong concept of employment protection and high labour standards, to an approach which prioritises employment creation, and minimises the role of social policy, since social policy is seen as potentially increasing the regulatory burden.     

Loan Sharks v. Short‐term Lenders: How Do the Law and Regulators Draw the Line?

With the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) having just published its ‘comprehensive review’ of some aspects of the business of short‐term lenders, this article examines the phenomenon of short‐term lenders. It draws on the legal and conceptual changes in the United Kingdom's consumer credit sector that have aided their proliferation. It argues that short‐term lenders in their current form are no different from loan sharks and that the current legal and regulatory framework has failed to provide the required protection for vulnerable credit consumers. It highlights how the United Kingdom's legal approach to consumer protection has been to the detriment of short‐term borrowers.     

Revolution Blues: The Reconstruction of Health and Safety Law as ‘Common‐sense’ Regulation

This article reviews the last five years of coalition government policy making in relation to occupational health and safety law. It shows that the most significant and influential element of this activity has been the reframing of the wider regulatory system according to a dominant ideological paradigm of ‘common‐sense’ regulation, to the detriment of other considerations and interests. A social constructionist framework assists in setting out the means through which this new ‘symbolic universe’ of regulatory possibility has been constructed and promulgated within the policymaking arena. In particular, it identifies the key role played by processes of deliberative regulatory engagement in the construction and development of this approach, and identifies the inherent vulnerability of ‘thin’ forms of deliberation to this sort of application.     

The impact of GDPR on European Name & Shame tax defaulter lists

This research analyses and compares tax defaulters’ lists in Europe from the legal perspective arising from the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation. We examined various regulatory systems which reflect a cross section of these ‘Name & Shame’ lists in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. Our findings indicated some legal aspects that contravene the GDPR rules. As a solution we propose a minimum standard model that allows for the publication of tax defaulter information without impinging on citizens’ fundamental rights.     

The FSA's ‘Treating Customers Fairly’ (TCF) Initiative: What is So Good About It and Why It May Not Work

This article examines the Financial Services Authority FSA's ‘Treating Customers Fairly’ (TCF) initiative as a case study of a regulatory strategy that aims to stimulate the self‐regulatory capacity of the regulated population to advance socially desirable goals – in this particular case, fair treatment for customers. It considers the development and nature of TCF and notes some difficulties that jeopardize its overall effectiveness. Parts one and two of the article consider the development and nature of TCF, while part three examines its appeal. Part four provides an overview of some problematic aspects of the FSA's initiative. The conclusion draws together the main threads of the analysis and considers the future of TCF and, more generally, consumer protection in the United Kingdom's system of financial regulation. The aim is to make a modest contribution to the debate about the proper direction of the present reform of financial regulation.     

‘National Antiquities’ and the Law

National museums, housing ‘national antiquities’, were a nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon throughout Europe. In the United Kingdom, they afforded the Treasury a means of preserving relics of antiquity claimed as treasure trove. While satisfying the desire of the scientific community for the preservation of archaeological finds, and national sentiment in Scotland and Ireland, Treasury practice undermined the British Museum's eponymous mission. This paper traces the development and legal consequences of the Treasury policy of national allocation of treasure trove, including the discussion in the Museums Committee of 1898–99 of the ‘nationality’ of objects and artefacts, and considers the potential wider significance of ‘national antiquity’ in the context of changing constitutional arrangements in the United Kingdom in the 1920s, and in the future.     

The donor-conceived child's "Right to Personal Identity": the public debate on donor anonymity in the United Kingdom

On 1 April 2005, with the implementation of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (Disclosure of Donor Information) Regulations 2004, United Kingdom law was changed to allow children born through gamete donation to access details identifying the donor. Drawing on trends in adoption law, the decision to abolish donor anonymity was strongly influenced by a discourse that asserted the ‘child's right to personal identity’. Through examination of the donor anonymity debate in the public realm, while adopting a social constructionist approach, this article discusses how donor anonymity has been defined as a social problem that requires a regulative response. It focuses on the child's ‘right to personal identity’ claims, and discusses the genetic essentialism behind these claims. By basing its assumptions on an adoption analogy, United Kingdom law ascribes a social meaning to the genetic relatedness between gamete donors and the offspring.     

Beyond the Gaze and Well Beyond Wolfenden: The Practices and Rationalities of Regulating and Policing Sex Work in the Digital Age

Drawing on the largest study of the United Kingdom online market in sexual labour to date, this article examines the legal and regulatory consequences as aspects of sex work increasingly take place within an online environment. Our research shows that while governmental policy has not kept abreast of these changes, the application of current laws (which have, since the 1950s, focused on public nuisance and, more recently, trafficking and modern slavery) are pernicious to sex workers and unsuited to recognizing and responding to the abuses and exploitation in online markets in sexual labour. These injustices are likely to be exacerbated if policies and policing do not better align with the realities of these markets in the twenty‐first century. This demands a more nuanced regulatory approach which recognizes that people may engage in sex work of their own volition, but which also addresses conditions of labour and criminal exploitation.     

Farmers,factories and funds: organised crime and illicit drugs cultivation within the British Vietnamese community

This article explores the growth of organised crime within the Vietnamese community with particular reference to the cultivation of cannabis, money laundering and the smuggling or trafficking of children. The article begins by exploring the history and diversity of the ‘Vietnamese community’ in the United Kingdom and the role of Vietnamese culture in shaping their criminal enterprises. It then draws on research involving two sets of qualitative data: one set is based on 45 interviews with law enforcement personnel based in Vietnam and the United Kingdom as well as with key stakeholders in the Vietnamese community; the other set is based on structured questionnaires issued to 34 Vietnamese residents in Britain, 24 of whom are here illegally. It examines the relationship between illegal immigration of Vietnamese citizens to Britain and the urban cultivation of cannabis, in what has become known as ‘cannabis factories’, and the laundering of the profits abroad to Vietnam. After exposing the logistics of Vietnamese illegal immigration into Britain, the article concludes that those involved in cannabis cultivation, money laundering and people smuggling are primarily motivated by profit rather than ‘lifestyle’ concerns, and operate within what theorists of organised crime refer to as the ‘mono-ethnic criminal network’.     

Financial Advice,Differentiated Consumers,and the Regulation of Equity‐release Transactions

In an asset‐based welfare context, which encourages the drawdown of housing equity to meet financial needs in later life, it is anticipated that the use of equity‐release products will become increasingly prevalent. In the last decade, and reflecting the strategic significance and high risk associated with this section of the home finance market, targeted equity‐release products (lifetime mortgages and home reversion plans) have come under the regulatory remit of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The FCA's approach to equity release is geared around professional financial and legal advice. Drawing on findings from a new qualitative study, purposively sampled according to socioeconomic circumstances at the time of the transaction, this article explores the role of financial advice within the factors that shape equity‐release decision making, and considers the implications of the FCA's regulatory commitment to the ‘advice paradigm’ in meeting (or not) the needs of a differentiated consumer population.