Civitas is a registered charity (no. 1085494) and a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales (no. 04023541) Independence: Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society is a registered educational charity (No. 1085494) and a company limited by guarantee (No. 04023541). Civitas is financed from a variety of private sources to avoid over-reliance on any single or small gro...

Comparative lawyers often argue that, upon close examination, technical differences between legal systems from a particular, e.g. Western, tradition are not as important as they might seem. From a functional viewpoint, these legal systems might in fact be converging. However, various degrees of convergence exist, depending upon the area of the law under examination. In tort law, sometimes a str...

The effort to codify areas of British and European law has gained new urgency under the efforts towards legal unification in Europe. This paper looks at English legal history during the 17-19 century, to explore earlier proposals for the codification at law. Although it is generally assumed that England’s common law system was inherently antithetic to legislative codification, there was a well-...

This article considers guerrilla gardening that involves taking on other people’s land for gardening, usually without their permission. It is a practice overlooked largely by criminology, yet it can tell us something about attitudes to law and ownership challenges the approved aesthetic order of where we live. soften look feel city, leading different emotional affective interaction with urbanit...

Abstract How do we talk about changing the law? This article considers rhetoric of law reform and what it can tell us current relationships between key institutions involved in relevant processes. A claim is that deployed formulating proposals complicate fate projects as they develop. Several examples from private criminal are used to support argument, with assessment interaction time legal dev...

Back in January 2008, the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced “everyone in England will have access to the right preventative health check-up . . . there will soon be check-ups on offer to monitor for heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and kidney disease.” Brown went further, pledging a national screening committee, an independent clinical body, that “will look at the evidence and advis...

This volume marks a welcome addition to published research on the establishment of a system of state medicine in Ireland during the nineteenth century. The author's objective is to explore the significance of the Medical Charities Act, 1851, and to analyse its effect on medical relief and epidemic control in Ireland up to the conversion of the Poor Law Commission to the Local Govemment Board in...

This paper considers how the longstanding liberal principle of freedom religion in education England was recontextualised within a marketised system school choice. First, potential conflict between right to belief and is outlined. The notion neoliberal legalism explored, first identifying defining neoliberalism as model regulation by market forces, then outlining ‘neoliberal legality’, manifest...

English law, like the English language, is an amalgam of diverse cultural influences. The legal system may fairly be seen as a composite of discrete elements from disparate sources. After the conquest of 1066, the Normans imposed on the English an efficiently organized social system that crowded out many Anglo-Saxon traditions. The Jews, whom the Normans brought to England, in their turn contri...