Law According To A King

"I'm an A-level student studying English Literature, History, and Government and Politics, currently serving as Deputy Head Girl of Herschel Grammar School, and a Co-Founder of the Herschel Law Society. I hope to study Law at university and pursue a career in the legal industry. I love to read - currently reading "The Idiot" by Fyodor Dostoevsky"." The question raised about felon disenfranchisement also inevitably raises the question as to whether the prison system should be more about rehabilitation, or punishment; something which must also be considered when contemplating this predicament. Convicted persons, during the time that they are detained in a penal institution, are legally incapable of voting at any parliamentary or local government election . One presumes this to be completely preposterous because prisoners, even those who serve the average life sentence, will eventually be released into society, and will be expected to become productive citizen...

The debate as to how far the office of the Prime Minister has evolved to become more like that of a President is a hot one in political and constitutional theory, but it does have some practical ramifications for the way we think about our leaders. This post shall take a look at the arguments for and against the 'presidentialisation' of the prime minister, and examine the consequences for either side.  Firstly, it is widely accepted that the executive office of the PM has grown in recent decades. In 1970, the cabinet office had just 600 staff, but under Tony Blair, that number grew to over 2,500. As a comparison, the executive office of the President has around 4,000 - though most scholars agree this growth can be attributed to the expansion of the administrative state since the end of WWII. Better, Dowding argues, to look at the role of the executive office. Dowding says the role of staffers in the PM's office is largely based around coordination across government, and the...

"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...

Following the July Court of Appeal's decision to allow Shamima Begum to appear in court to argue her case in person, Boris has railed against the judiciary, calling the decision to grant Begum legal aid "odd and perverse", and committing the government to review not just the legal aid policy, but the entire system of judicial review. This article will set out the case for protecting and expanding legal aid provision in Great Britain, and examine the effects of an absence of legal aid on the justice system as a whole.  The case of Shamima Begum It is likely that you will already be familiar with Ms Begum - the infamous ISIS fighter who left the UK aged 15 to fight alongside the terrorist organisation in Syria. Following her discovery in 2019 by a journalist, then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid revoked her citizenship. Begum had married a Dutch jihadist a week after arriving in Syria, with whom she had three children, none of whom survived infancy. According to reports in the T...

In the United Kingdom, our judiciary is completely unelected, sparking accusations of cronyism, a lack of democratic legitimacy, and corruption, but when compared to countries and regions where the courts are elected, the UK's system stands out as a remarkably well-oiled machine. In the US, however, judges are more commonly elected at the state and local level (the federal judiciary remains wholly appointed), and the US is, unsurprisingly, seen across the world as a dysfunctional political system - leading to the characterisation of US-style democracy as "America's deadliest export" by the American journalist and author William Blum. But what impact does the election of judges have on the integrity of the judiciary, and does it actually hurt democracy as much as we might think? Politicisation of the judiciary The main argument in favour of an appointed bench is that it holds back the growing tide of politicisation. Now, of course, this doesn't mean that appointed ...

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...