Law According To A King

"Two students currently studying A-Levels, having just finished the first year, aspiring to do Law at university with interests in both criminal law and commercial law." The past year has seen the rise of intense demonstrations all around the world ultimately named as part of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. Regarded as the spark of these protests, on the 25th of May 2020 Minneapolis Police Department detained George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man accused of buying cigarettes with a ‘counterfeit’ $20 bill. Derek Chauvin, one of the police officers who was tasked with detaining Floyd, kept his knee on his neck for around nine minutes resulting in unconsciousness and ultimately the death of George Floyd. On April 20th 2021 Mr. Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The case was heavily publicised with a lot of media coverage and many agreed Derek Chauvin received a fair trial yet some argue, due to the ...

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...

When it comes to the central question of legal philosophy, academics are divided. Do we have an obligation to obey the law? Crimes are committed on a daily basis, some benignly, others maliciously, and yet we are faced with the same question of whether we have a duty to follow the rules that govern our society. Wolff argues we never have such an obligation - a legal anarchist - whereas Raz approaches this from the more transactional perspective: we have an obligation to obey the law when it helps us to do something we wanted to do anyway. Shelby, on the other hand, pays particular attention to the role of society in answering the question, and argues that our obligations are differentiated on the basis of how society treats us.  Shelby writes of the ghetto: an urban neighbourhood characterised by concentrated poverty, racial segregation, violence and crime, unemployment and numerous other social issues that cast our imagination to scenes not dissimilar to those in The Wire , where ...

"I would consider myself a confident person who likes to socialise and spend time with their friends in their free time. However, I have a more serious side and in my spare time also like to debate current issues in the world and consider different viewpoints about these issues." In 1707, English law became one of two legal systems in different parts of the same  United Kingdom. Since then, the law is something that billions of people put their faith in daily: from trusting that people will be fined for not picking up their rubbish to trusting that  the big, bad criminals will be locked up in prison. However, devastating mistakes have made  many people in todays’ society, including me, question should we truly trust the legal system  that we have relied on for many years? If I say the names Derek Bentley and Elijah McClain  you may not recognise them. But that is where the problem lies, these two innocent people  deserve to be talked about more and how the ...

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...

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...

 'Cancel culture', defined as a form of ostracism in which someone is forced out of social or professional circles - either online, in real life, or both - as the result of doing something that is considered objectionable or offensive, is becoming more and more relevant, particularly in the age of Trump, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter. It is derided by those on all sides of the political spectrum as stifling discourse and freedom of speech, while its proponents argue that 'cancelling' someone is merely the consequence of their wrongful behaviour. This poses an important legal question, particularly when the courts routinely protect freedom of speech, arguing that "freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having." But, similarly, the courts have also imposed constraints on the freedom of speech - indeed, it has long been accepted one cannot yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre and expect to face no consequences if there was no fire. This blog post s...

"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...