Law According To A King

Modern international law finds its basis in the ruins of the global order following WWII, when the major superpowers of the USA and the Soviet Union were allied against Nazi Germany, and human rights were at the top of the agenda. At the Moscow Conference in 1943, the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union discussed the end of the war and spoke to the importance of establishing "at the earliest practicable date a general international organisation, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving States ... for the maintenance of international peace and security." It was this event, preceded by the London Declaration and the Atlantic Charter of 1941, that led to the creation of the United Nations at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.  The basis of international law, therefore, is the equality between all States - the notion that international law cannot be imposed on a sovereign State without its consent - and ...

Mill's 'harm principle' forms the basis of many of our legal principles, particularly when viewed from the perspective of a liberal critic. This harm principle, which states that the law should only regulate behaviour to prevent harm to others, has a particularly strong case when considering anti-discrimination law, which exists primarily to prevent people from suffering the effects of both direct and indirect discrimination - direct being when a rule singles a group out for unfavourable treatment (think segregation or denying service to gay customers), and indirect being when an apparently neutral rule has a disproportionate impact on a minority group (for example, literacy qualifications for voting may disproportionately harm immigrants or minorities from low-education backgrounds). The harm principle underpins much of anti-discrimination law, but when it comes to certain areas, the law seemingly abandons it and takes a different approach, and these shall be examined in t...