Law According To A King

"Hi! My name is Lily and I am an 18 year old A Level student from Northamptonshire. I am currently studying History, Sociology and Politics and hope to study law at university next year. I am particularly interested in Human Rights law, and the way in which this intersects with LGBTQ+ issues." Liberal’, ‘tolerant’ and ‘progressive’ are all terms that most would associate with the British legal system. The most significant changes in pursuit of these factors have been made rather rapidly and recently, most notably through the Equality Act 2010. This combined previous ad hoc anti-discrimination laws, and combined them into one piece of more coherent and accessible legislation. The Act contains nine ‘protected characteristics’: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. Workplace and wider social discrimination against an individual falling into any of these categories is no...

" I'm 17 and currently doing my A-levels in History, Government & Politics and Philosophy & Ethics. I enjoy cooking, video games and debating social problems with others; which'll hopefully help me when I go to University to do law." Arabella, a young woman in her late 20s, was left confused and scared after an encounter with a man called Zain. Whilst the beginning of their hook up began well, midway through Arabella’s partner removed his condom without her knowledge and consent. She felt violated after learning what he did, not knowing that non-consensual condom removal (also known as ‘stealthing’) is rape and prosecutable under UK law.  Whilst Arabella and her story is fiction, from the 2020 BBC show “I May Destroy You”, stealthing is all too real and a growing problem in the 21st century. But what is stealthing? While it seems to be very self-explanatory as just the removal of a condom without a person’s consent, there are nuances within the law that broade...

"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 ...

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...

 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...