Law According To A King

"My name is Aleksandra Goluch. I am a 2nd year law student who is interested in animal rights, travelling and ice skating." Animal testing is an outdated and cruel method of conducting tests on new products. Each year over 100 million animals are used worldwide to test new products, study human disease and develop new drugs. Every 8 seconds 1 animal dies. Data from the ‘Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals Great Britain 2018’ published by the U.K. Government, shows that 3.52 million procedures on animals were conducted in the United Kingdom. Moreover, of the 1.8 million experiments completed, 94,000 were classified as “severe,” including “long-term disease processes where assistance with normal activities such as feeding, and drinking are required or where significant deficits in behaviours / activities persist.” More recent statistics, released by the Home Office in 2020, indicate a decrease of 15%, comparing to 2019, in conducting animal procedures i...

"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...

"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...

 In Britain, the law regarding sex work is complex. Certain acts, namely that of engaging in sex for money, is legal, but a number of related acts, from soliciting in public, 'kerb crawling', managing a brothel, and others are illegal, severely restricting the work of prostitutes and other sex workers. Laws intended to protect sex workers, such as child prostitution, trafficking and the offence of paying a sex worker who has been subjected to force, are haphazardly enforced, leaving sex workers in a grey area - fearing the police and prosecution, but relying on the law to protect them. This blog post will examine some of the key failings in the law that leave prostitutes in dangerous territory, and the fight by groups such as the English Collective of Prostitutes to decriminalise prostitution entirely.  The key legislation outlawing street prostitution, public solicitation, and brothels are the Policing and Crime Act 2009, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Sexual Offences A...

The transmission of HIV is a criminal offence in England and Wales, under s.20 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which criminalises the reckless infliction of grievous bodily harm, and this was upheld by the Court of Appeal in R v Dica. While sex is not the only way that HIV can be transmitted, the majority (if not all) the cases deal with HIV transmission through sex, making this a very sensitive area of the law. Indeed, one of the difficulties with proving the transmission of HIV from the defendant to the victim is just that: proving that the defendant did indeed give the virus to the victim, and the victim didn’t get it through some other act. The CPS advises that prosecutors pay detailed attention to the scientific and/or medical evidence before them in helping to prove that the virus was transmitted by the defendant – one way of doing this is a process called phylogenetic analysis, which can demonstrate how closely related the HIV strains are in samples taken from bo...