King Charls His Case: The Intended Prosecution of Charles I

Charles I was put to death without having pleaded to the charges preferred against him during his trial. This article examines the case that his prosecutor later said he would have opened, had the king entered a plea. John Cook's case was predictably forthright in its denunciation of the accused. On the other hand, it has some highly significant omissions; some of it was legally and factually hopeless, and much of the rest invited fairly obvious responses; whilst its exposition was much more contentious than one might expect from a case for the prosecution of a man whose guilt had already been pronounced ‘notorious’. Rather than simply setting out a wholly unsatisfactory indictment of the king's alleged ‘guilt’, as a mere prelude to the shedding of his blood, Cook's true aim appears to have been to goad the king into making, before the eyes of the watching world, a case in his own defence sufficient to enable the king's judges, having heard what he might have to say, and subject to ‘the merit of the Cause’, to hand down some sentence other than death - all as the Act erecting the high court of justice authorized them to do.     

Patent Cases in the Court of Chancery, 1714–58

The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it discusses recent improvements in the cataloguing of Chancery bills and pleadings entered between 1714 and 1758, held in the C 11 series at the National Archives. This has made it much easier to locate cases by subject, and a methodology for doing this is described. Secondly, the article outlines the results of work carried out in C 11 on cases relating to patents for invention. Although there has been significant research into how other forms of intellectual property right were adjudicated in the Court of Chancery, notably copyright, patent law for this period remains obscure. The article shows that Chancery (along with the common law courts) retained the principal jurisdiction in patent law, rather than the Privy Council as was once thought.     

The biopolitics of China’s “war on terror” and the exclusion of the Uyghurs

This article provides an overview of People’s Republic of China (PRC) counter-terrorism policies targeting Uyghurs since 2001 when the state first asserted that it faced a terrorist threat from this population. In reviewing these policies and their impact, it suggests that the state has gradually isolated and excluded Uyghurs from PRC society. Drawing on the writings of Michael Foucault, it articulates this gradual exclusion of Uyghurs as an expression of biopolitics where the Uyghur people as a whole have come to symbolize an almost biological threat to society that must be quarantined through surveillance, punishment, and detention. Rather than suggesting that these impacts of China’s “war on terror” coincide with the intent of state policy, the article argues that they are inevitable outcomes of labeling a given ethnic population as a terrorist threat in the age of the Global War on Terror.     

Effectiveness of contamination prevention procedures in a trace explosives laboratory.

The effectiveness of a number of the explosives contamination prevention controls that are adopted within the Forensic Explosives Laboratory (FEL) principal trace laboratory has been scrutinised. Within the trace laboratory, rigorous procedures for processing forensic swab samples for traces of organic explosives are routinely adopted by forensic scientists. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of these procedures, and the principle of separating the sample from the laboratory and the forensic scientist, explosives-free swab samples and appropriate controls have been processed, in accordance with trace laboratory procedures, in several explosives contaminated environments. In all cases, no explosives were detected in the post-processing samples, demonstrating that the contamination prevention procedures are effective, robust and fit-for-purpose.     

The Possibility of Deontic Logic

A recent series of papers, sparked off by a note by Robert Walter (1996), has rekindled the debate over the possibility of creating a logic of normative concepts. The debate correctly centres on ways in which Jørgensen’s dilemma might be resolved (Jørgensen 1937–8), since a means of resolving that dilemma is the only apparently available way in which to establish that a logic of norms is possible. Two separate questions require answers: (i) what is the correct way in which to regard Jørgensen’s dilemma; and (ii) how should one face that dilemma? I shall argue that traditional responses to the first question are inadequate, and I shall then try to expose as flawed two recent attempts to resolve the dilemma. Finally, I shall relate my conclusions in the earlier part of the paper to the wider question of whether a logic of normative concepts is, after all, a possibility.