Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
As new students dive into life as a 1L, recent graduates await their bar results and lawyers continue to soldier on in their ever-changing, ever-growing profession. Legal ethics scholar Deborah L. Rhode, author of The Trouble with Lawyers, and law professor Benjamin H. Barton, author of Glass Half Full, joined us to chat about a few hot topics in law.
Sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by UN peacekeepers is not fresh news. It has been going on for years. It first hit the headlines over ten years ago, and the scandal drove the UN to take action. Yet recent allegations over SEA by French peacekeepers in 2014 have brought the issue to the forefront again, and have motivated the UN Secretary-General to escalate the UN’s response to SEA in its peacekeeping operations.
Greece is not alone in suffering from budget cuts arising from the era of austerity. In the UK, local councils, libraries, museums – all public services have been cut. Criminal Justice has not escaped this cost-cutting. The consequence has been fewer police officers on the streets, less money for legal aid lawyers, and closures of Magistrates courts.
“For policing scholars, space, places, and the physical and social environment have served as significant contextual backdrops,” state Cynthia Lum and Nicholas Fyfe, Special Editors of the Policing Special Issue. To mark Policing’s new Special Issue on ‘Space, Place, and Policing: Exploring Geographies of Research and Practice’, we’ve put together a map showcasing the global and place-based approaches the journal’s contributors have taken towards policing research.
Preparing for law school doesn’t have to be purely academic; there’s plenty you can learn from film and TV if you look in the right places. We asked Martin Partington, author of Introduction to the English Legal System, for his top ten film recommendations for new law students and aspiring lawyers.
Ten students at two visitors at Wesleyan University have been hospitalized after overdosing on the recreational drug Ecstasy, the result of having received a “bad batch.” The incident elicited a conventional statement from the President of the University: “Please, please stay away from illegal substances the use of which can put you in extreme danger.”
Some years ago Dave Markell and I noticed that commentary on climate change law was devoting a tremendous amount of attention to a small handful of judicial opinions as being representative of trends in climate change litigation, whereas inventories of climate change litigation, such as the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center blog, included hundreds of active and resolved cases.
Fire and collapse in Bangladeshi factories are no longer unexpected news, and sweatshop scandals are too familiar. Conflicting moral, legal, and political claims abound. But there have been positives, and promises of more. The best hope for progress may be in the power of individual contracts.
August 19th is World Humanitarian Day, declared by the UN General Assembly in 2008, out of a growing concern for the safety and security of humanitarian workers who are increasingly killed and wounded direct military attacks or infected by disease when helping to combat global health pandemics.
In the sixth instalment of the Oxford Law Vox podcast series, competition law expert Frank Wijckmans talks to George Miller about cartels and EU competition law. Frank is an author, alongside Filip Tuytschaever, of Horizontal Agreements and Cartels in EU Competition Law, and he covers the key themes of the book in his conversation with Law Vox.
Since the end of World War II, with the creation of the United Nations, the rules and structure of the traditional inter-state community have been changing. International law is increasingly shifting its focus from the state to the individual. It gradually lost the features of the classical era, placing greater emphasis on individuals, peoples, human beings as a whole, humanity, and future generations.
Knowing when and how to cross-examine is an essential part of properly representing clients in international arbitrations. Many cases have been won by good cross-examinations and lost by bad cross-examinations, and that is just as true in international arbitrations as it is in any other dispute resolution procedure in which counsel are permitted to cross-examine witnesses.
Medicare recently announced that it will pay for end-of-life counseling as a legitimate medical service. This announcement provoked little controversy. Several groups, including the National Right to Life Committee, expressed concern that such counseling could coerce elderly individuals to terminate medical treatment they want. However, Medicare’s statement was largely treated as uncontroversial—indeed, almost routine in nature.
Which Nordic state had sovereignty over Iceland until 1918? Which state was allowed to discriminate against a transgender woman by annulling her marriage? Who disputed ownership of Eastern Greenland before the Permanent Court of International Justice? In preparation for the European Society of International Law’s 11th annual conference, this year held in Oslo, test your knowledge of Nordic countries in international law with our quiz.
Sanitation has evinced considerable interest from policy-makers, lawmakers, researchers and even politicians in recent years. Its transformation from a social taboo into a topic of general conversation is evident from the fact that one of the central themes of a recent mainstream Bollywood production (Piku, 2015) was the inability of the protagonist’s father to relieve himself.
Over the last 20 years I have been involved in policing leadership development against a backdrop of increasing complexity. I have had the enviable role of having been a police officer, medically retired as a result of an almost fatal stabbing, as well as being a coach and mentor to high performing leaders at all levels in the service.