Law According To A King

With any civil rights movement, there are necessarily two branches that work hand-in-hand: the activist, and the legal. In most, if not all, cases, the activist will precede any changes to the law - gay marriage was legalised long after the majority of Americans thought it acceptable, for example - and so it is often frustrating for a civil rights activist to sit back and wait for the law to catch up to a milestone they have already achieved. This post will take a look at the most consequential LGBTQ+ legal events of the past year, and consider what might come next.  Gay Marriage in Northern Ireland  As a result of the Good Friday Agreement, and the Northern Ireland Act of 1998, devolution was formally re-established in the country, and on December 2nd, 1999, devolved powers were officially granted to the legislature, known as the Northern Ireland Assembly. This followed the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly after 1997 referendums in each of these...

What is the rule of law? In my opinion, it does not exist. It simply cannot exist. There are too many contradictions, too many gaps, and too many criteria that even the most utopian society could not declare itself subject to the rule of law. But to disregard it, we must first understand what it claims to be. Nick Barber wrote that the rule of law “asks what it means to be governed by law, rather than men.” The first societies decided their own unofficial laws based on the ideas of their leaders, whereas the first civilisations decided their laws based on the ideas of their people, with the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. For a period of about 2 million years, hominid groups (primarily hunter-gatherers) appeared to have distributed justice based on the views of a council of elders, or often a simple individual Their laws were likely based on superstition, natural ideas of justice, and the hocus-pocus of the leaders themselves. When civilisations were developed, while brutalis...