Law According To A King

"We were fighting and it was for our lives," said Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, of the moment when police stormed the Stonewall Inn on June 28th, 1969, and with these nine short words, she summed up the long history of the struggle for queer legal liberation. This blog post will take us through how the UK, and the world, moved from the medieval criminalisation of homosexuality to the current state of legislated equality, and a look towards the future of the next steps in the story of LGBTQ+ rights.  The first time in law that male homosexuality was targeted for persecution in the UK came under the Tudor monarch Henry VIII, whose Buggery Act of 1533 outlawed sodomy in England with the penalty of death. The preamble to the Act cited the absence of "sufficient and condign punishment" in law to deal with the "detestable and abominable vice" of homosexuality as the core reason for the bill's passage, though modern scholars, including Johnson and Lafitte, attrib...

Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire [1988] 1 AC 53 was a landmark case in establishing limits on third party liability for tortious negligence. The estate of Hill, the final victim of Peter Sutcliffe (better known as the Yorkshire Ripper), sued the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire police, claiming that their failure to apprehend the killer sooner negligently caused her death. Anyone with some knowledge of the Yorkshire Ripper case is aware of the disastrous investigation led by the police, which failed time-and-time-again to catch Sutcliffe, who they had interviewed nine times in connection with the murders. The 1982 Byford report heavily criticised the police for what was, at the time, the largest manhunt in British history – they had focussed too heavily on hoax confessional tapes and letters (against the advice of experts and victims alike) and their poor filing system meant that officers were left underprepared and key connections were not made linking evidence to Sutcl...