Food law has played a central, contested role in defining the UK's post-Brexit identity as a regulating and trading nation. Mapping reforms to key areas of food law across retained EU law, the UK internal market and UK trade law and policy reveals profound reforms, and an emerging, distinct UK approach to law-making. We identify three themes: increased conferral of regulatory powers and functions to UK Ministers, coupled with an expansion of so-called non-legislative approaches to regulation and policy-making and increased scope for divergence between UK nations. These reforms have achieved core aims of the UK government: autonomy from the EU, a fully frictionless internal market within Great Britain, and streamlined regulatory reform. However, the achievement of these aims has come at a price. Food law reveals that post-Brexit legislative processes have been shaped by, but also entrench, unilateral executive decision-making, lessened transparency and disunity between UK nations.

The protection of national security has traditionally been an exception to general norms of public accountability, based on prerogative powers. The last three decades have seen efforts to bring national security closer to the normal constitutional control mechanisms of parliament and the courts. The design of and changes to mechanisms of accountability have, however, been accepted without discussion of the often narrower purposes for which they were first established (most notably for oversight of surveillance), the extent of their departure from constitutional principles, or their impact in embedding new forms of exceptionalism in the constitutional framework. This article critically assesses these developments, prompted for example by the Law Commission's recommendations to reform official secrets laws, which adopted trusted intermediary and indirect accountability models without full consideration of historical and contemporary concerns or the exceptionalism on which they were based. Though focused on the UK, our account provides a cautionary tale for national security law reform in any modern democracy.

This article argues that the law governing transfer of allowances within the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) should place greater weight upon transactional (and environmental) integrity, even over market liquidity. More broadly, it reflects on the role played by registries in sharing or concealing information about the material world. Although property rules enable market activity through the creation of an abstract carbon commodity, they must also link past to future entitlements in a just way. In emissions trading markets, justice in private transactions is intimately connected to public questions of environmental justice. The relevant EU Regulation prioritises facility of transfer over protection of existing holders, insulating registered entitlements from prior proprietary claims. This approach ignores the important connections between history, integrity and responsibility in both public and private spheres. A preferable response would be to distinguish between transactional and register error, protecting against register mistakes, but not transactional defects.

Analysis of UK employment and labour law is often characterised by a curious dissonance. The overarching narrative mandates that labour law is a countervailing force to the inequality of bargaining power, embedded with values and assumptions concerning the nature of employment relations and the role of labour law. And yet, labour law jurisprudence tends to treat with respect, and seeks to decipher, abstract statutory concepts and tests derived from judicial pronouncements as if they were, indeed, a ‘brooding omnipresence in the sky’. This paper seeks to bridge that gap, by offering a legal realist account of the legal doctrine that governs the employment of agency workers, focusing on the ‘necessity’ and ‘sham’ tests. It assesses the legitimacy of importing legal tests from one (commercial) context to another (employment) context; questions the courts’ protestations that their use is mandated by precedent; and outlines the real implications for the status and rights of agency workers in the UK.

In this paper, I argue that the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 are fatally flawed. This is a criticism more often levied at knee-jerk responses to policy crises, precisely because they are created without the benefit of time and thought. Yet, far from being a knee-jerk response, these Regulations were the product of considerable thought and deliberation following a sensitively executed public inquiry. Notwithstanding the apparent rigour of the process which produced them, I argue that the 2014 Regulations will fail, because they rely too heavily on the rhetoric of criminal law while failing to take into account the competing norms for compliance and the impact of NHS budget constraints. Further, they push the CQC towards a heavy-handed deterrence approach to enforcement, which will increase hostility between regulatees and the inspectorate, and ultimately reduce the scope for developing the transparency about failures which is sorely needed in the NHS. This paper challenges the contemporary wisdom that it is primarily knee-jerk regulatory responses that suffer from fatal flaws of this nature.

Notwithstanding the 19th century formal abolition of slavery as legal ownership of people, modern slavery and forced labour have not been consigned to the past. In fact, their existence is more widespread, and made more difficult to tackle due to the lack of formal, legal criteria. This article suggests that reference to the past, historical institutions reveals seven ‘badges of slavery’ that are helpful in identifying occurrences of modern slavery and forced labour. These are: humiliation, ownership of people, exploitation of the vulnerable, lack of consent, terms and conditions of employment, limits on the power to end the employment relationship, and denial of rights outside the work relationship. These aspects constitute modern slavery as such, and thus distinguishes it from other instances of exploitative employment relations, however problematic. In addition, even where the label of modern slavery is misplaced, the identification of particular badges of slavery in contemporary employment relations may assist in highlighting their troubling facets.

This article examines whether crimes motivated by, or which demonstrate, gender ‘hostility’ should be included within the current framework of hate crime legislation in England and Wales. The article uses the example of rape to explore the parallels (both conceptual and evidential) between gender‐motivated violence and other ‘archetypal’ forms of hate crime. It is asserted that where there is clear evidence of gender hostility during the commission of an offence, a defendant should be pursued in law additionally as a hate crime offender. In particular it is argued that by focusing on the hate‐motivation of many sexual violence offenders, the criminal justice system can begin to move away from its current focus on the ‘sexual’ motivations of offenders and begin to more effectively challenge the gendered prejudices that are frequently causal to such crimes.

This article considers the development and use of the law regulating the prosecution of parents under section 444 of the Education Act 1996, in the broader context of legislation and policy initiatives concerned with the governance of parental responsibility. It explores the ways in which the power to prosecute parents has been used by local educational authorities (LEAs) and interpreted by the courts. The article critically analyses the manner in which the powers emphasise punishment and retribution in the context of the social moralisation of ‘flawed’ parents; pay insufficient regard to the effects of parental responsibility laws on low-income, single parent families; represent an attempt to impose a simple solution on to a complex socio-economic problem; and amplify the scope for mothers to be made the subject of criminal justice interventions. It is argued that the prosecution of parents imposes an unfair burden on mothers and, in particular, single parent mothers

A central concern for all those actively engaged in the continuing corporate governance debate is the question of how best to hold the tension between allowing company directors their entrepreneurial heads whilst ensuring appropriate safeguards for the company itself. Take one problem as an illustration. What is the potential liability of a director who personally pursues a business venture which corresponds to the line of business of the company in which he or she holds a directorship? Prominent amongst the equitable devices which it is thought can be harnessed to good effect in striking an acceptable balance between these potentially conflicting objectives is what has become known as the 'corporate opportunity doctrine'. Corporate opportunities, though not in the strict sense assets of the company, are regarded as such, with the consequence that it is not open to company directors to exploit them for their own personal gain.