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Item Embargo Reconceptualising The Role of Actual Causation in Criminal Law(Hong Kong Law Journal (Sweet & Maxwell), 2024-07-04) Baker, D. J.This article examines two important themes arising from several recent Court of Appeal decisions concerning causation in criminal law. The first theme analysed will be the issue of factual causation in cases where the free, deliberate, and informed act rule is relevant. The second interrelated theme that will be analysed is the requirement not to look to prove factual causation in cases where V has died because D failed to take an opportunity to prevent what was causing V’s death from continuing to cause V’s death. In such cases the duty to act is used to ground liability and thus causal indeterminacy does not allow D to evade criminal liability.Item Open Access Corporate Non Compliance with Section 54 Modern Slavery Act 2015: "Nobody's kicking our ass"(Journal of Modern Slavery, 2024-06) Lawson, Karen; Walsh, D.Section 54 of the UK’s Modern Slavery Act requires certain companies to publish annual statements, detailing steps taken to manage risks of modern slavery. However, many companies still have yet to fulfill their most basic legal requirements. Prior research has largely examined the quality of published statements; thus, the reasons and remedies for non-compliance are not wholly understood. The present study directly sought the views of non-compliant companies, finding apathy and the lack of repercussions for non-compliance as central to their continuing inertia. We also argue for a number of measures, including stronger penalties and enforcement, to increase compliance rates.Item Metadata only Entrepreneurship: An Auspicious Context for Examining Its Connection to Wellbeing(Palgrave Macmillan, 2023-09-01) Gali, N.; Chui, Susanna L. M.Item Open Access Politeness, face, and rapport-building in remote and face-to-face investigative interviews with witnesses(2024-05-22) MacLeod, N.; Oxburgh, G.; Walsh, D.; Farrugia, L.; Nash, A.In guidance issued to police interviewers in England and Wales, the concept of rapport is placed front-and-centre, highlighted as a crucial element of the ‘Engage & Explain’ element of investigative interviews since the PEACE framework was widely adopted in 1993 (see CPTU 1992a, 1992b). Although rapport-building has been shown to be effective, there is little information in the research on what this means in practice – particularly in linguistic terms – and rapport is notoriously difficult to operationalise (Pounds, 2019). This paper aims to elucidate the relationship between face-work and rapport building in investigative interviews with witnesses. To do this, a small corpus of recorded mock interviews between a PEACE-trained interviewer and research participants assuming the role of witness to a moderate crime were assembled from a larger set collected as part of a project investigating the efficiency of investigative interviews conducted online as compared to via traditional face-to-face methods . These comparisons are not the subject of this paper; rather, we attempt to map rapport-building strategies evident in the mock interviews onto understandings of face work in interaction.Item Embargo Invoking Human Rights to Protect Unmarried Couples(Lexis, 2022) Rodway, HelenThis article explores the methodology developed in Re an application by Siobhan McLaughlin for Judicial Review (Northern Ireland) [2018] UKSC 48 and other recent cases that have seen cohabitants use the European Convention on Human Rights to gain access to legal protections originally intended exclusively for spouses and civil partners. It will be argued that whilst McLaughlin demonstrates a robust approach to discrimination affecting unmarried couples, the methodology is caveated leading to questions surrounding whether its scope is wide enough to have any substantial benefit in future litigation. This article undertakes a systematic analysis of the stages of an ECHR claim to argue that the developments in these cohabitation cases should be welcomed, and that there is a role for human rights to play to alleviate the discrimination facing cohabitants. However, the continued acceptance of the legitimacy of promoting formalised relationships to justify different treatment alongside a disproportionate weight attached to the presence of children means that the methodology may have limited application.Item Embargo Maternity Allowance: the Last Bastion of the Marriage-Based Benefits System Under Threat from Article 14(Sweet and Maxwell, 2022) Rodway, HelenThis article explores whether Maternity Allowance (MA) (insofar as it allows spouses and civil partners who are not employed but take part in their spouse’s business but not analogous cohabitees to qualify) is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights art.14 when read with art.8 and/or art.1 of the First Protocol on the basis that it discriminates against cohabitants and their children. Through a systematic analysis of an art.14 claim, this article examines the methodology developed in McLaughlin’s Application for Judicial Review (Northern Ireland), Re to determine whether it could be relied upon in a claim challenging MA. As will be seen, there are differences between Widowed Parent’s Allowance, the benefit challenged in McLaughlin and MA. However, it will be evidenced that the methodology developed in McLaughlin has the scope to be deployed successfully in the context of MA. Ultimately, this article will conclude that a successful challenge to MA could be the latest example of cohabitants using strategic litigation to potentially further the legal protections available to them.Item Metadata only Coercion, Control and Criminal Responsibility: Exploring Professional Responses to Offending and Suicidality in the Context of Domestically Abusive Relationships(Sage, 2023-09-12) Munro, Vanessa E.; Bettinson, Vanessa; Burton, MandySignificant strides have been made in the law's recognition of harms arising from domestic abuse. In England and Wales, the Serious Crimes Act 2015, and in Scotland, the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018, have supported a more holistic understanding of the dynamics of abuse and the means by which coercion and control are deployed to cement and supplant perpetrators’ violence. In this article, we explore what the introduction of these offences means in other situations where questions regarding the impact of abuse upon victims’ agency arise: specifically, where victims commit an offence that might have been compelled by abusive behaviour or take their own lives in contexts that might indicate perpetrators’ liability for suicide. In particular, drawing on interviews with professionals across both jurisdictions, we highlight the precarity of recognition of the effects of coercive control and the need to engage in more complicated discussions about when and why context matters.Item Open Access Applications of Legal Psychology in Japan: Current practice, research knowledge, and future directions(Universiy of California Press, 2024-03-05) Orthey, R.; Satchell, L.; Rechdan, J.; Kyo, A.; Walsh, D.We examine practices in the Japanese criminal investigation in light of investigative interviewing, concealed crime knowledge detection, and line up identification procedures. The investigative interviewing section considers suspects and victims and& eyewitnesses separately. Each section features a description of current Japanese practice, followed by a review of the current state of the literature. Each section ends with a reflection and suggestions for future research.Item Open Access The Material Constitution and Extractive Political Economy(Cambridge University Press, 2023-01-15) Lander, JenniferMongolia’s recent transition to a mineral exporting economy has much to tell us about the relationship between economic change and constitutional transformation. It reveals how the legal construction of markets invite a bevy of transnational economic and legal ‘actors, norms and processes’ which interact with the national constitution. Natural resource extraction, in particular, is charged with the potential to catalyse material constitutional change within the state, by virtue of its profound socio-environmental impacts, the generation of new conflicts over resource control within the state and the exposure of national institutions to transnational investment norms within the context of volatile global commodity markets.Item Open Access Funerary Rites and Rights of the Dead: Jurisprudence on covid-19 Deaths in Kenya, India and Sri Lanka(Brill, 2023-01-12) Nyamutata, ConradPandemics are associated with exponential mortality rates, creating heavy burdens on communities. The high death rates affect how societies traditionally conduct funerary practices as governments impose regulations on the preparation of bodies and the conduct of the funerals to stem the transmission of the virus. In societies associated with deeply entrenched customary funerary practices, such limitative measures attract defiance. The tensions between public health objectives and funerary traditions have played out in a number of societies resulting in litigation. At the core of the disputes is whether the right to manifest religion or belief can be upheld, and relatedly, whether the dead have rights to dignified burials irrespective of pandemics. During the covid-19 pandemic, some courts had to grapple with these difficult questions. In this paper, I take a jurisprudential excursion on some disputes in Kenya, India and Sri Lanka to assess the adjudication of conflicts which arose from covid-19 pandemic deaths.Item Embargo Decolonising and decriminalising child marriage in Africa(Wiley, 2023-08-25) Nyamutata, ConradChild marriages, often attributed to culture and gender inequality, are prevalent across Africa. Several countries have moved to criminalise the practice. At the core of the criminalisation debate are the fundamental tensions between statutory (state) law on the one hand, and religious and customary law on the other. The growing momentum towards punishment, targeted almost invariably at male offenders, is meant to address the conflict between cultural practices that lead to child marriage and the protection of children's rights. However, some countries have not criminalised child marriage. Thus, the outlawry of child marriages is not universal on the continent. The agitation towards criminalisation—I describe this as ‘popular punitvism’ ‐ as a panacea, is animated by Western penological justifications, principally, deterrence. However, Western criminological and penological theories may not fully account for a phenomenon in other social and geographical spaces. The paper argues for decolonising and decriminalising child marriages in Africa but not legalising it.Item Embargo Critically-ill children and the international human rights system: assessing the status and role of the UNCRPD in the case of Archie Battersbee(Brill, 2024-01-10) Nyamutata, ConradOver the past few years, some parents and clinicians in the UK have argued about decisions on the fate of critically-ill children, with the cases ending in protracted and emotionally-sapping legal disputes. The long -running legal conflicts have played out in the public eye, eliciting conflicting opinions. At the core of the disputes is whether parents or clinicians should determine the appropriate course of action. In the event of the disagreements, the domestic court intervenes guided by the ‘best interests’ principle. A corpus of scholarship, falling on either side of the debate, has captured the contradictions. Until recently, the discourse had focused on the common recourses to domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights. However, in the recent case of incapacitated 12-year-old Archie Battersbee, his parents sought redress from the international human rights system through the Committee on the Rights of People with Disabilities to stop termination of his life support. The courts barred the involvement of the Committee on the basis that the UK had not incorporated the treaty which birthed the Committee. The case brought into sharp focus the relationship between international law and domestic law. First, this paper asserts that the weight (not) given to international law by the domestic courts was inconsistent with its treatment of international obligations in other cases. Secondly, the position that unincorporated treaties do not have legal effect in domestic proceedings is ambiguous. Finally, the treaty body appeared ill-suited to handle a case of a critically-ill child in the face of the impatient demands of local justiceItem Open Access The ideological construction of Western ISIS-associated females(John Benjamins Publishing, 2020-05-04) Nyamutata, ConradSince the outbreak of the war in Syria, some Western women and girls have travelled to the warzone to join the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and marry some of the group’s fighters. However, since the collapse of the ‘caliphate’ some of the women and girls have been stranded amid reluctance to accept them back to countries of origin. The women and girls have been the subject of various descriptions and labels. This is a conceptual and theoretical study which examines the ideological construction of females who travelled from Europe and West to join ISIS. The paper uses discourse analysis to examine the use of particular labels in the Western media, drawing primarily from the British press, on the ISIS-associated females seeking return to the West. The paper finds that a naturalized and dominant discourse has developed in the ideological construction of the femalesItem Open Access The Decolonisation of Children’s Rights and the Colonial Contours of the Convention on the Rights of the Child(Brill, 2020-03-10) Nyamutata, Conrad; Faulkner, ElizabethThe United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 1989 has been celebrated for its universal acceptance. However, questions still arise around its provenance and representation. In particular, the Convention is deemed to enshrine Western notions of childhood upon which its rights were constructed. However, the legacy of the colonial contours of the new world order are often excluded within the context of children’s rights. It has been suggested that the new imperialism brandished under the guise of ‘children’s rights’ serves as an effective tool to ‘beat’ the Global South, deflecting from the continued Western dominance within the field of children’s rights. This paper interrogates the power dynamics and colonial legacy upon which views of children are formed, centralising the multitude of issues in the arena of children’s rights in the wake of what can be identified as Hokusai’s wave.Item Open Access Indigenous Rights in Mongolia: Challenges and Opportunities(2024) Lander, Jennifer; Hatcher, Pascale; Byambasuren, TserenSince 2019, Jenny and Pascale have been conducting research into the complaints submitted by the herders of Khanbogd and Tsoggtsetsei to the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is part of the World Bank Group. A key aspect of these complaints was the claim that Mongolian herders are indigenous peoples and should therefore get more rights according to IFC’s own Investment Performance Standards. Our research is based on analysis of the CAO complaints and agreements, alongside interviews with key stakeholders on the Tripartite Council (TPC) (herders, local government, Oyu Tolgoi (OT) and NGOs) and a focus group with herders. After being delayed by COVID-19, we are grateful to Tseren Byambasuren for assisting us to conduct more interviews in Spring 2022. This short brief is intended for herders impacted by Oyu Tolgoi mine in the South Gobi. It lays out the main conclusions of our research and suggests long term avenues for herders to advance their objectives.Item Open Access Identification by Voice (1)(Lexis Nexis, 2023-12-12) Robson, Jeremy; Smith, HarrietItem Embargo ‘Is he a barrister or not?’ A study on perceived and actual accentism at the Bar of England and Wales(Equinox publishing, 2023-12-12) Robson,Jeremy; Braber, Natalie; Jarman, Jane; Ching, Jane; Stevens, Olivia; Pautz NicholasBarristers present formalised legal arguments before courts and tribunals. As a result, considerable focus is placed on their oral skills. However, people are frequently judged by the accent they use. Those with a more standard accent – ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP) in the UK – can be perceived as more intelligent and eloquent. This creates a barrier to social mobility because accent-based bias can discriminate against those with non-standard accents. This article examines how the public perceives barristers in England and Wales with different accents and investigates experiences of barristers to establish whether accent discrimination disadvantages certain speakers. It includes an online survey of the general public which found that RP and South-East English accents are still seen as more prestigious. In addition, interviews with barristers illustrate how accent discrimination is widespread and affects career progression.Item Metadata only A year on the Block: What have we learned from a shift in delivery? Is block teaching (and learning) the way forward?(WONKHE, 2023-09-15) Koenig, BrettA year on the Block: What have we learned from a shift in delivery Is block teaching (and learning) the way forward?Item Metadata only Reflections on Learning and Teaching during COVID(Higher Education Policy Institute, 2021-03-12) Koenig, BrettThe use of learning technology as an attempt to supplement traditional teaching methods has been on the rise in higher education for the last decade and has been in existence for centuries. While changes should usually come about in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way, the pandemic has forced overnight changes onto education.Item Open Access Case Commentary: Insanity: R. v Usman Court of Appeal (Criminal Division)(Sweet and Maxwell, 2023-09-20) Mackay, R.A commentary on the Court of Appeal's decision in R v Usman