Public Access to the English Coastline: An Analysis of Part 9 of the Marine and Coastal Access Bill

The Marine and Coastal Access Bill includes legislative provisions for improving public rights of access to the English coast. This paper examines the background to the coastal access proposals and analyses the draft legislative framework in the context of ongoing controversies over the creation of public rights of access to private land. It also considers the issue of compensation payments to the owners and occupiers of land affected by the coastal access proposals.     

I Blog Therefore I Am

Twenty-five years since the publication of Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, this essay reflects on the extraordinary changes in the nature of celebrity, including its radical democratization by way of the internet. Such changes reflect old dilemmas and pose new challenges as the internet and publishing worlds begin to merge and print culture is left behind.     

‘Illegal Migrants’, Gender and Vulnerability: The Case of the EU’s Returns Directive

Feminist legal efforts to make sense of the external migration policies of the European Union (EU) have focused almost exclusively on the EU’s initiatives against trafficking in women. This article examines one of the more neglected areas of EU immigration policy—the return of ‘illegal immigrants’. It analyses the so-called 2008 Returns Directive in the light of the multidimensional inequalities experienced by migrant women, which affect their migration status and expose some of them to the threat of removal. Owing to insecurities over external migration, the Directive constructs even the most vulnerable migrants as a threat to be controlled and is likely to result in detrimental consequences for many migrants, and in particular already vulnerable women who are likely to be further disadvantaged by it.     

Cohabitation and Comparative Method

The paper intervenes in current policy debates on unmarried cohabitation and comparative law debates on methodology. It adopts a culturally alert, discursive methodology of comparison to study regulation of unmarried cohabitation under the common law and civil law as well as the effect of an entrenched right to equality protecting against marital status discrimination. It identifies not different legislative solutions to a common problem, but distinct discourses of family law regulation. Yet the approaches are less radically opposed than is often thought. Discursive comparison tends to highlight dominant voices at the expense of minority ones, wrongly characterising minority views as foreign to a tradition. Discursive comparison should not confine itself to a synchronic view of present legal debates; a richer diachronic approach will also attend to views within a legal tradition's past.