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Individual Contributors to Policy Commons
Independent commentary on law and policy from a liberal constitutionalist and critical perspective
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Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 4 May 2024 English
Star Wars Day, 2024 I once came across a quote in a history book which I have never been able to re-find. It was from an acquaintance of I think …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 24 April 2024 English
24th April 2024 I am not an American lawyer, but here are some thoughts from an English litigation perspective. Trump is adept at what he calls (or his ghost writer …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 22 April 2024 English
22nd April 2024 One theme of my blogging is the relationship between law and lore. By ‘law and lore’ I mean what people believe to be the law to be, …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 17 April 2024 English
17th April 2024 Hugh Grant has acted in many counter-intuitive scenarios. But the situation he described today on Twitter is perhaps the most counter-intuitive predicament of them all: * Grant …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 25 March 2024 English
25 March 2024 Over at Prospect I have written a piece on the remarkable witness statement of Johnny Mercer MP given to the current Afghan war crimes inquiry. (On that …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 21 March 2024 English
21st March 2024 Back in December 2022, this Blog picked up on something odd. Click here to read that post. Joshua Rozenberg picked up on the strange development – and …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 8 March 2024 English
8th March 2024 Yesterday over at Prospect I did a post on the curious situation of the Michelle Donelan libel settlement. Please click and read the post here. Here I …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 10 February 2024 English
10th February 2024 This week Prospect posted something by me on the issue of a potential border poll in Northern Ireland. Please click (and read!) here. This post unpacks that …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 30 January 2024 English
30th January 2024 The decisions of judges, other than about case and court management, can be divided into two sorts. First, there are rulings. These rulings can be about the …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 29 January 2024 English
29 January 2024 * The next general election in the United Kingdom is now less than a year away. The latest possible date the next general election can be held …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 16 January 2024 English
16th January 2023 Time is a problem for the Post Office, and its government owners, in making any legal claim against Fujitsu. This is because any claim would probably be …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 12 January 2024 English
12th January 2024 The Post Office Horizon scandal is both simple and complex, straightforward but also difficult to grasp in all its interconnected detail. The essence of the scandal is, …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 1 January 2024 English
1st January 2024 The current parliament must end, by automatic operation of law, before the end of this year. By reason of the Parliament Acts the parliament elected in December …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 31 December 2023 English
2024 will be a test for the very notion of legitimacy at the basis of the United States constitution * The last post over at my Substack was fairly UK-centric …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 15 December 2023 English
15th December 2023 * Those criticising human rights law and lawyers often shy away from spelling out the substance of a particular right * You may or may not remember …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 1 December 2023 English
1st December 2023 Discussing yesterday’s post with a long-suffering friend, the following thought came to mind. In the Rwanda judgment, the Supreme Court goes into detail as to the work …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 16 November 2023 English
16th November 2023 Yesterday the Supreme Court handed down its appeal judgment in the Rwanda policy case. For an informed view on the case, it is worth taking the time …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 10 November 2023 English
10th November 2023 Even if the United Kingdom government wins on the lawfulness of the policy, it has already lost in respect of procedure * Those interested in day-to-day politics …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 9 November 2023 English
9th November 2023 The extraordinary newspaper column of the Home Secretary – the Home Secretary! – should be either consequential (in that the Home Secretary loses their job) or significant …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 1 November 2023 English
All Saints’ Day, 2023 The Leveson Inquiry ended badly: the recommendations of the report were botched and then ignored. But the Inquiry was not without value: the Inquiry placed into …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 25 October 2023 English
25th October 2023 * The legal(isitic) concept of proportionality does not exist in a vacuum, for it is a term for the relationship between means and objectives * There is …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 11 October 2023 English
11th October 2023 Thierry Breton is the Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union and yesterday he sent a letter: * You may have strong views – very strong …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 30 September 2023 English
30th September 2023 This is first in a series of posts on the Post Office Horizon prosecutions scandal * The Post Office prosecutions scandal is the United Kingdom’s greatest mass …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 23 September 2023 English
I have been working on two longer posts, which should be up in the next few days. One is on the Post Office miscarriage of justice: in particular, the legal …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 9 September 2023 English
9th September 2023 Over at Prospect magazine I have written an article headlined Whatever happened to ‘the best-governed city in the world’?. Please do click and read it. The rest …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 8 September 2023 English
8th September 2023 On this anniversary of Elizabeth II’s death, we are still in the legislative session commenced with the Queen’s Speech of May 2022 – one monarch and two …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 7 September 2023 English
7th September 2023 Birmingham has more canals then Venice and more hills than Rome – you will be told – and it has the largest local authority in Europe and …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 24 August 2023 English
24th August 2023 One conceit of many liberal constitutionalists is that they have a monopoly on constitutionalism: that is the notion that constitutional rights and structures are fundamental to political …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 21 August 2023 English
21st August 2023 (Source) * The court system is inherently about performance: about justice being seen to be done. And the legal system, more generally, is inherently about coercion: about …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 15 August 2023 English
15th August 2023 There is an old Hebrew proverb which can be roughly translated as: What is the difference between a wise person and a clever person? A clever person …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 8 August 2023 English
8th August 2023 (Picture credit.) * The former president of the United States is facing serious legal trouble, with a serious criminal indictment which takes seriously his role in the …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 2 August 2023 English
2nd August 2023 A future historian, tasked with working out from contemporaneous sources what ‘witch-hunt’ meant in 2023, would conclude it meant a slow methodical and evidence-based process, with full …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 31 July 2023 English
31st July 2023 The leader of the opposition is a former litigator, and many litigators have a certain strategy – or at least a set of tactics: a certain cautious …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 26 July 2023 English
26th July 2023 * Much – most – of the commentary about what Elon Musk is doing with the social media platform previously known as Twitter focuses on his personal …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 19 July 2023 English
19th July 2023 (This post is a long excerpt from a fuller post at the Empty City substack for paying subscribers.) * This post is about the border poll that …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 7 July 2023 English
7th July 2023 This is a close reading and exposition of the letter sent on behalf of Twitter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman and chief executive officer of Meta. The …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 6 July 2023 English
6 July 2023 Threads is the the social media platform of the day. (My Threads account is here – and the early impressions are positive, though further functionality needs to …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 3 July 2023 English
3rd July 2023 Over on Twitter, the estimable Dr Cath Haddon is live-tweeting a talk from a former cabinet minister to the Institute of Government: Here is an idea for …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 1 July 2023 English
1st July 2023 * The overlooked obstacle to the United Kingdom withdrawing from the ECHR * From time to time the demand comes from a government minister, or from one …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 29 June 2023 English
29th June 2023 Today the Court of Appeal ruled that the United Kingdom government’s controversial Rwanda removals policy was unlawful. The judgment is here and there is a court-prepared summary …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 27 June 2023 English
27 June 2023 A sensible policy proposal to monitor the recommendations of coroners’ inquests * * “How did this person die?” In any organised society this is one of the …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 26 June 2023 English
26th June 2023 In the words of the eminent jurist Paul Simon: “Time, time, time See what’s become of me “Time, time, time See what’s become of me While I …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 25 June 2023 English
25th June 2023 Here is a painting of an empty city. It is a perfect, bright, ideal(ised) empty Renaissance cityscape. And here is another (almost) empty though less cheerful cityscape: …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 23 June 2023 English
23rd June 2023 I hope all of you had a happy midsummer* – and now it will be another year before we get this much sunlight again. My website had …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 21 June 2023 English
Midsummer Day, 2023 There are now big political names giving oral evidence at the Covid Inquiry for the first “module” covering the preparedness of the government for a pandemic. This …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 20 June 2023 English
20th June 2023 There is a useful general rule of writing: if more than one person, in good faith, mistakes the point you are making then it is the fault …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 19 June 2023 English
19th June 2023 In December 2019, Boris Johnson had the greatest prize that our constitutional arrangements could bestow. He had led his party to a substantial majority at a general …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 16 June 2023 English
16th June 2023 The flaws and the errors of the case for Brexit are many and obvious, but those who oppose and want to reverse Brexit also have a problematic …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 15 June 2023 English
15th June 2023 * Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through; First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can …
Individual Contributors to Policy Commons · 14 June 2023 English
14th June 2023 Here is a story about law-making told in different ways. The law in question is a statutory instrument made under the Public Order Act 1986 – the …