Enhancing Cohort Identity in Legal Education

This poster explores student 'cohort identity' and its link to student belonging and enhancement. It presents strategies for enhancing cohort identity and identifies practices that have worked in practice

“Avoiding the battle or deliberately opaque? Fair labelling and accessible language in the abortion debate”.

A visual presentation of the outmoded, frequently opaque and confusing language used in abortion regulation, professional guidance, related literature and debate. This poster presentation will attempt to stimulate debate about the ethical, moral, practical and legal implications of the language and labels used and the case for/against continued opacity. No specific position is taken on the rights of the embryo/fetus or on any right to abortion but it is argued that any legal protection that is offered should be reasonably defined

Drinking can harm a foetus, but court finds girl born with disorder wasn’t victim of crime

This is a paper about the Court of Appeal judgement in CP (A Child) v Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority [2014] EWCA Civ 1554. The story behind the case has stirred up considerable public and media debate. Could a child born with Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) claim compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA). It was alleged that the child (called ‘CP’ in the proceedings) had been born with FASD as a consequence of her young mother’s excessive alcohol consumption during pregnancy in circumstances where she was aware of the danger of harm to her unborn child. The case raises interesting issues about the role of the criminal law and the burden of risk taking behavior during pregnancy

Mismatch in notifications reveal a worrying problem in our abortion statistics

A discussion of a 2014 Department of Health report concerning abortion notifications in England & Wale

CROP DIVERSITY AS THE DERIVED OUTCOME OF FARMERS' 'SURVIVAL FIRST' MOTIVES IN ETHIOPIA: WHAT ROLE FOR ON-FARM CONSERVATION OF SORGHUM GENETIC RESOURCES?

Crop genetic resources are the building blocks of sustainable agricultural development due to their relevance not only as inputs for variety development but also as indigenous crop insurance mechanisms through traditional variety portfolio management. Their continuous survival is, however, threatened by natural and human driven factors. This threat has induced the need for designing conservation measures. Among the in situ and ex situ conservation options available to conserve crop genetic resources, on-farm conservation has recently attracted enormous attention. To make this option operational, placing incentives (that link conservation with utilization) and removal of perverse incentives are believed to be crucial so that landraces of no immediate interest to farmers can be conserved. However, before designing sound incentives and/or removing perverse incentives, we have to understand farmers' motives for managing a portfolio of traditional varieties. To address our objective, we have adopted a utility based model that considers on-farm diversity as a positive externality of farmers' livelihood decisions. Accordingly, on-farm diversity is considered as the derived outcome of farmers' revealed preferences subject to their concerns and constraints. To empirically test the relationships, a Poisson regression model is estimated using rural household survey data collected from 198 sorghum growing farmers in East Ethiopia. The results have shown the most important diversity promoting factors and those factors detaching the link between farmers' 'survival first' motives and their spillover effects on sorghum diversity. Based on the results, the paper concludes outlining the policy implications of the findings.On-farm conservation, sorghum genetic resources, incentives, Poisson regression, Ethiopia, Crop Production/Industries,

Hazelwood School – A Catalyst For Reformatory Education?

Hazelwood School was established at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in Birmingham, by the Hill family. This paper argues that the ethos and unique practices adopted at the school by the Hills, together with their individual activities, which were influenced by a series of socially-minded individuals with whom they came into contact, can be seen as contributing to the choice of Birmingham as the location for the first national conference on the reform of juvenile criminals, held in 1851, and to the development of the reformatory and industrial schools that were later established to accommodate criminal children. Additionally, the efforts of successive generations of the Hill family, who continued to work to improve the treatment of neglected and criminal children, were so progressive that their influence extended beyond Victorian Britain

Don't forget the legal framework: the public provision of non-invasive prenatal testing in England & Wales

If the central purpose of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) is to deliver improved reproductive autonomy - by facilitating enhanced choice between the continuation and termination of pregnancy - any public funded regime ought to be compatible with the legal grounds for decision-making in this context. It is problematic for a State to facilitate access to information that would or is likely to result in legal dilemmas and conceptual issues for those using these tests. Public funded testing should not be available for purposes that would be or are likely to be ‘incompatible’ with any framework for lawful abortion. In England and Wales, those incompatible purposes currently include the identification of: (1) gender in the absence of other genetic factors, and (2) specific abnormality that is unlikely to yield serious disability at birth. Consequently, expansion of the NIPT regime to include these purposes should entail changes in the abortion legal framework