Law According To A King

Lady Hale, the first female President of the UK Supreme Court, has long been an advocate for increased diversity at the bench. A self-avowed feminist, it is unlikely that she would have taken a different viewpoint, but when one of the finest legal minds in the United Kingdom says something, it is important to listen.  There are different kinds of diversity, Lady Hale reminds us - from race and ethnicity, to gender, socio-economic class and legal specialism. A family lawyer, Hale took the lead on some of the most significant family law cases in modern legal history, from Stack v Dowden , which established that factors other than financial contributions can be taken into account when dividing a property, to R (Gentle and Or) v The Prime Minister & Ors , where although the applicant was ultimately unsuccessful in her attempt to open an independent inquiry into the Iraq War, the position of Lady Hale as a judicial force was cemented, crediting her family specialism with her unique ...

Social media is hard to categorise into being merely a public service or a private institution. It's immense strength and popularity rival that of the largest governments, and it is increasingly used by those governments as a platform for carrying out the country's business, particularly in the age of Trump and Twitter. However, they are still capitalist, profit-focused organisations, that write their own rules and control their own algorithms. Outside of public pressure, there is no requirement for them to act in the best interest of their users, or indeed democracy.  But this has opened up social media to a whole host of criticisms, as well as the wider world of 'big tech', culminating in plans proposed by former US presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to break up social media companies, and an executive order by Donald Trump to ban the use of TikTok, a popular video-sharing app, in the US unless it is sold to an American company. Social m...