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Showing posts with the label EU law

Becoming Visible... Disabilities In Equal Opportunity

Through seeking equality, the law seems to aspire to do the impossible: erase differences. Though progressive legislation and regulations in Europe often single out disabled persons for favourable treatment to overcome systemic and historical disadvantages, the core approach of the law remains the same. This is undoubtedly a more challenging task when seeking to ensure all disabled people live on an equal footing, and the law has often given up when it seems too hard, particularly considering how the disabled community are uniquely diverse in their characteristic that qualifies them for protected status; for the LGB+ community, they are protected by virtue of their sexual orientation, for ethnic and racial minorities, it may be their culture or their skin colour, and for women, men, and transgender individuals, they are protected because of their sex. Disabilities are far more diverse than even culture: some estimates have there being 6,000 distinct cultures in the world, whereas there...

We are not EUmused... The Supreme Court's Judgment on Prorogation

Yesterday, the UK Supreme Court ruled on what is possibly the most important constitutional law case in a generation. In the case of R (Miller) v Prime Minister [2019] UKSC 41, the court handed down a judgment that we will be seeing the reverberations of for decades to come. It is an intensely political case, but the court were keen to set aside partisanship and rule simply on the law as they saw it. You may recall, a few weeks ago when Johnson announced the prorogation of Parliament, I wrote a post saying that it was a legal exercise of the prerogative powers, but evidently I was too hasty in making this judgment. Lady Hale, the President of the court, handed down a unanimous judgment that declared the prorogation was illegal, and thus, in effect, didn't happen at all. But let's look at how they came to this decision, and the key parts of their judgment... For some background: The UK decided in a referendum in 2016 to leave the EU. Whilst the result was not legally bind...

Look What You Made Her Do... Taylor Swift's Dispute in Contract and IP

First of all, I have never studied intellectual property law, particularly US intellectual property law, and so I have dealt with this from a broad perspective as if it was set in the UK. Anyway, here goes... If you haven't heard of the Taylor Swift drama with Scooter Braun - get up to date on pop culture. Swift signed a contract with Big Machine Records in 2004 at the age of 15 for, presumably, 6 records before the contract could be renewed. She left BMR after her sixth album, reputation, and signed with a new record company to release her seventh album, Lover. BMR retain ownership of her masters, and the company has since been sold to Scooter Braun, who isn't exactly Swift's friend, and Swift has publicly denounced Braun and his business ethics and behaviour, and tried to get her masters back. This issue has a few legal implications in contract and intellectual property, and these will be dealt with in turn. What are Taylor Swift's options? Contract Swift sign...