Searching for Pigeons in the Belfry: The Inquest, the Abolition of the Deodand and the Rise of the Family

This article explores the abolition in 1846 of the deodand – the object or animal declared responsible for death by an inquest jury – and its relationship with the family of the deceased. Drawing on the work of Jacques Donzelot, it argues that the deodand brought contingency into the heart of law, and that its replacement with a legal right to compensation for dependents was a move to rationalize the investigation of death. This rationalization had consequences; limiting the place of the unruly community, centering and regulated the family, and disconnecting the inquest from the material of death

The Solicitors Qualifying Examination: Perspectives on the Proposed Changes to Legal Qualification

Executive summary Legal education and training are fields characterised by uncertainty, containing major data gaps and research unknowns. This report suggests that the Solicitor Regulation Authority’s July 2020 application to the Legal Services Board for approval is premature, particularly in its lack of completed guidance on SQE2 and qualifying work experience (QWE) as well as its lack of evidence on the acknowledged attainment gaps use of informal networks in legal recruitment. The SQE proposals lack an evidence base demonstrating how the changes will improve longstanding problems with diversity in the legal profession. This research project underpinning this report, The Solicitors Qualifying Examination: Perspectives on the Proposed Changes to Legal Qualification, drew on desk-based studies of legal and policy materials, supplemented with responses to a survey. The report is designed to demonstrate how socio-legal studies, which are completely omitted from the SQE proposals, provide valuable contextual analysis in legal research and study, developing key skills for students and aspiring solicitors. Respondents who took part in our survey, who told us they had a good understanding of SQE plans, highlighted a range of detailed questions about the implications of the proposals as currently formulated. These comments have underscored our view that despite the SQE’s undoubted progressive potential, it is an education and training experiment with possibly serious implications for quality, cost and diversity. However, if SQE plans are to be approved, it is vital that a gentler introduction is implemented, with slower phasing out of the current route to enable time for clarification of some of the key aspects of the proposals. We suggest the following next steps: - Wait for more details on SQE2 sample questions, marking and moderation; - Wait for more details on QWE including how many weekly hours are required (particularly when undertaken voluntarily and/or on a part-time basis); - Require an analysis of the social security (universal credit) rules and employment law framework for internships to assist both aspiring solicitors and organisations; - Require evidence on how informal recruitment networks operate in the legal profession and how these might be ameliorated with the introduction of the QWE, perhaps in collaboration with the Sutton Trust; - Require a detailed pilot study of SQE1 and SQE2 with those solicitors’ apprentices finishing in 2021-22, allowing a more extensive analysis of SQE assessment processes; - Require the release of the raw data for the SQE1 and SQE2 pilots. The SRA have acknowledged an attainment gap in SQE assessments and the LSB should require more evidence that the SQE will not exacerbate existing inequalities; - Require analysis of the SRA’s experience with the equivalent means route of qualification, including data on protected characteristics for applicants; - Confirm data gaps for the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL)/Common Professional Exam (CPE), Legal Practice Course (LPC) and training contracts as well as for the SQE and QWE. Data on aspiring solicitors should include markers of both protected characteristics and other aspects of concern, including first in family to attend university, history of free school meals, type of school attended for GCSE & ‘A’ levels, ethnicity, gender and disability. Without further refinement the SQE risks making signifiers of ability (educational establishments, social networks, identity, location and nature of work experience) even more influential in the solicitors’ profession than they are today

Ian Ward, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England

Review of Ian Ward, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England (Hart Publishing, 2014)

Looking for justice : the family and the inquest

This thesis critically examines the claim that ‘family’ is at the heart of the contemporary inquest system, analysing the impact of this putative change on the construction of kinship, death and the legal. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it engages with socio-legal and cultural analyses of death; family and kinship scholarship; and critical legal scholarship on death and the state. In doing so it reveals the richness of the inquest as an area of law which has hitherto attracted relatively little attention but which merits extended exploration. Drawing on historical and jurisprudential materials in the first section, it provides an analysis of the changing historical form of the inquest, and argues that legislative and judicial reconfiguration of the inquest process since 2003 has fundamentally changed the nature of the system, most importantly in relation to the engagement of family prior to a final hearing. It argues that this engagement of the family affects the jurisdiction and form of an individual inquest, and developing this analysis, it explores a series of interviews undertaken with Coroners and officers in England. This empirical work deepens the earlier analysis, drawing insights from reflections on a set of vignettes which trouble the edges of ideas of family; emphasising the ways in which images of family and kinship are conceptualised and materialised through the unfolding of an individual inquest. The central argument is that ‘family’ is a negotiated and constitutive feature of the inquest system; charged with overseeing dignity in a bureaucratic process, making substantive and transparent that which may be otherwise impenetrable and formal, and simultaneously determining the edges of the private and intimate. The thesis contends that an emphasis on meaningful connections to the deceased leads to a fluid construction of kinship, and a reimagination of the politics of both death and family. It argues that the inquest system, without narratives of kinship and connection, risks existing in a solely technocratic form in which ‘disinterested decision-makers using objective, rationalist and universalised forms of knowledge justify decisions that are communicated in an expert language’ (Morgan 2006, 246), and the family bring a ‘tacit expertise that underpins shared experiences, values, symbols, identities and understandings, [providing] the tenor or texture of debate [that] transmits and generates a community because of its capacity to defy routinisation and the explicit codes of expert knowledge’ (Morgan 2006, 259). Working through the inquest process and unpicking these contrasting forms of expertise, this thesis reveals the way in which an individual inquest is constructed through an endeavour to combine contrasting tensions; to blend a contingent, contextual, participative and meaningful process with the ceremony of a mini state funeral (Davis et al 2002), the collection of statistical information, and the setting of standards to prevent future deaths

Marginalisation, Grenfell Tower and the voice of the social-housing resident: a critical juncture in housing law and policy?

This paper draws on historical institutionalism to consider the impact of housing-policy responses following the Grenfell fire on the marginalisation of the social-housing resident. We consider three specific policy responses: reform focused on conditions of rented properties; the social-housing White Paper; and building regulation and building-safety reforms. We suggest that, in historical institutionalist terms, each is part of a matrix of reform in which understandings of the social-housing resident play a critical role. We argue that rather than the fire provoking a paradigm shift in the recognition that government accords to the ignored and stigmatised citizens who live in social housing, the policy initiatives to date indicate a much more limited adjustment of policy within a normal frame. We suggest that this is because housing policy is dominated by a consumerist ideology that is self-reinforcing and ignores the social, economic and political complexity of tenure

Fire Safety, Building Regulations and Empowering Residents

Notes the continuing need to empower tenants of tower blocks to identify fire safety issues relevant to their homes. Reviews the development of the Fire Safety Checklist to assist them, key provisions of the consultation document "Building a Safer Future", whether implementing the private right of action for breaches of building regulations under the Building Act 1984 s.38 would improve efficiency and whether it should have retrospective effect

Legislating for a Pandemic: Exposing the Stateless State

Initially the subject of widespread consensus, legislative and policy responses to coronavirus are increasingly provoking predictable, albeit understandable, reactions. The right and the left are united by a concern that essential freedoms are being eroded by a State utilising the opportunity of the pandemic to make a power-grab. Focused on the Coronavirus Act 2020, this article takes a more cautious approach, suggesting instead that the law should be understood not as the product of a hierarchical State but rather as a demonstration of the ‘statelessness’ of the contemporary state. The article examines the Act, with particular focus on open justice, adult social care, and Business Improvement Districts. We argue that reading this unique piece of legislation through the lens of the stateless state reveals the complexities, ambiguities and contestations within contemporary policy making. We suggest that dismissing the Act as unnecessarily authoritarian is an insufficiently nuanced response, and furthermore, that this exploration of the law allows us to develop and complicate scholarship on the stateless state

De Novo and Rare Inherited Copy-Number Variations in the Hemiplegic Form of Cerebral Palsy

PurposeHemiplegia is a subtype of cerebral palsy (CP) in which one side of the body is affected. Our earlier study of unselected children with CP demonstrated de novo and clinically relevant rare inherited genomic copy-number variations (CNVs) in 9.6% of participants. Here, we examined the prevalence and types of CNVs specifically in hemiplegic CP.MethodsWe genotyped 97 unrelated probands with hemiplegic CP and their parents. We compared their CNVs to those of 10,851 population controls, in order to identify rare CNVs