Warwick Law School News

Research from the University of Warwick is set to help genealogists better understand family history by providing a fresh insight into attitudes towards divorce, bigamy and bereavement through the ages.

The findings are published in a new book written by Professor Rebecca Probert from the School of Law – a leading expert on the history of marriage law in England and Wales – who has been painstakingly investigating centuries-old legal precedents, newspaper accounts, statistics and census data to shed new light on our ancestors’ behaviour.

Warwick Law Society has won two awards at the inaugural LawCareers.net Student Law Society Awards, which were sponsored by DWF. The competition was tough with 32 student law society entrants. The outgoing Executive Committee were pleased to be awarded Best Mooting Activities, sponsored by McMillan Williams Solicitors, and Best Law Society President, sponsored by King & Wood Mallesons. The society was also shortlisted for Best Pro Bono Activities (top three) and Best Law Society Overall (top four).

A House of Commons Justice Committee enquiry into the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has published its findings in a new report this week.

Professor Jacqueline Hodgson, Director of the Criminal Justice Centre in the School of Law, University of Warwick, was invited to give oral evidence to the Select Committee in January 2015 and in the new report the Committee has endorsed her calls for the CCRC to adopt a more robust approach in its referrals to the Court of Appeal.

It has just been announced that Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi from the Centre for Human Rights in Practice at the University of Warwick has been long-listed for her work by the prestigious George Orwell Prize for Journalism. If Rebecca wins, it will be the second Orwell Prize for the University of Warwick’s Centre for Human Rights in Practice in three years.

Treaty conflicts are not merely the contingent or inadvertent by-products of the increasing juridification of international relations. In several instances, States have deliberately created treaty conflicts in order to catalyse changes in multilateral regimes. Surabhi Ranganathan uses such conflicts as context to explore the role of international law, in legal thought and practice. Her examinations of the International Law Commission's work on treaties and of various scholars' proposals on institutional action, offer a fresh view of 'mainstream' legal thought. They locate in a variety of writings a common faith in international legal discourse, built on liberal and constructivist assumptions. Ranganathan's three rich studies of treaty conflict, relating to the areas of seabed mining, the International Criminal Court, and nuclear governance, furnish a textured account of the specific forms and practices that constitute such a legal discourse and permit a grounded understanding of the interactions that shape international law.

Following the news that Elle Sheerin is to present her research at the 2015 British Conference of Undergraduate Research (BCUR), Elle will be joined by two other Law School undergraduates.

Ibrahim Babiker and Tara Ifill will be presenting their project titled ‘Looking at the Practice: An Analysis of the Impact of Legislative Approaches to the Problem of Payday Lending Schemes’.

Congratulations to all three of our undergraduates, and good luck at the upcoming conference.

A group of Law School undergraduates visited the Warwickshire Justice Centre in the last week of term. They met with Her Honour Judge Sylvia De Bertodano, a Circuit Judge, and had a tour of the police cells.

While sitting in on Court proceedings, the students witnessed the sentencing of a jury member after he admitted to googling the defendant. The story made local and national headlines.

Undergraduates will be visiting the Justice Centre again on 11 May. Any student interested in attending can contact Jane Bryan for further details.

Stephen Connelly has posted the notes from his seminar on Spinoza given at Warwick Law School on Critical Legal Thinking

Professor Ann Stewart will be visiting India from the 8th-16th April 2015 to take part in a number of activities including a seminar organised jointly by Warwick and JNU as part of the 'Another India' series of events, to coincide with Warwick's 50th Anniversary.

The Warwick European Law Society this week hosted the third annual Warwick German Law Moot, with teams from UCL, Birmingham and Warwick competing.

All teams performed extremely well and did a good job in making their case – in German - with the team from UCL coming first place overall.

Congratulations to all the teams.

Colombe Cahen-Salvador, Joshua Redman, Sara Bedir and Yasmin Hughes Pugh, all Warwick University Law School students, have formed Refugee Rights, a project which aims to raise awareness around Human Rights.

As part of their campaign, the students have produced a video documenting the experiences of real refugees through the eyes of actors, and showing the importance of the Human Rights Act for the most vulnerable.

The legal and political evolution of the European Union has not, thus far, been accompanied by the articulation of any substantive ideal of justice going beyond the founders' intent or the economic objectives of the market integration project. The absence arguably compromises the foundations of the EU legal and political system. This edited volume brings together contributions addressing both legal and philosophical aspects of justice in the European context.

There have been many accounts of the EU as a story of constitutional evolution and a system of transnational governance, but few pay attention to the implications for justice. The EU has moved beyond its initial emphasis on the establishment of an internal market, yet most legal analyses remain premised on the assumption that EU law still largely serves the purpose of perfecting a system of economic integration. The place to be occupied by the underlying substantive ideal of justice remains significantly underspecified or even vacant, creating a tension between the market-oriented foundation of the Union and the contemporary essence of its constitutional system. The critical assessment provided by this book will help to create a fuller picture of the justice deficit in the EU, and open up an important new avenue of legal research.