SLSA Conference University of Sussex Socio-Legal Studies Association Conference 12-14 April 2011 Authors and Abstracts Mark Abe Keisuke, Equitable Estoppel in Family Law: Intent and Reliance as Determinants of Parenthood ([email protected]) In 2006, the highest court of the state of New York held that, where a child justifiably relied upon the representation of a man that he was the father, with the result that the child would be psychologically harmed by the man‘s subsequent denial of paternity, the man should be estopped from asserting that denial. The court imposed fatherhood although the DNA test results clearly indicated that the man was not the biological father. Likewise, the Japanese Supreme Court recently denied a putative parent‘s claim for declaration of non-existence of the parent-child relationship, where that putative parent was the very person who had filed the false notification of birth with the municipal office years ago. The putative parent in this case apparently wanted to leave the entire estate to the other child. The judicial emphasis on intent and reliance can be understood as a reflection of modern legal consciousness, which generally attaches great importance to personal autonomy. An individual is deemed to be capable of making a rational decision, so the law holds him responsible when another individual has reasonably relied on his statement. This individualistic approach to family relations may have multiple implications for the future of family law, especially as it relates to issues such as surrogate motherhood, because, under this view, a person who has expressed his intent to be a parent should be legally treated as such, when others have relied on his statement and changed their position detrimentally. Simone Abram, Owning people and owning policy: Property in time, space and perspective ([email protected]) In the pantheon of neo-liberal government (eg in the not-so ‗New Public Management‘), the idea of investing ownership in policies is central to creating legitimacy for governing strategies. When these policies involve the demolition of people‘s homes, feelings of ‗owning policy‘ might be disrupted by feelings of ownership over the property that constitutes home. Whether or not a house is owned by the inhabitants, or whether it is rented from others, feelings of ownership often constitute the house as a person (as Levi-Strauss suggested in his definition of ‗house society‘). But can we equally understand policy as person? Does policy have properties or property-like aspects that correspond to house-property, or is it a different kind of person? This paper examines policy as person, property as person, and person as property through a study of urban regeneration policy and ‗housing renewal‘ in the UK Hadeel Abu Hussein, The Palestinian Arab Minority of Israel ([email protected]) Due to the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 1948 – the creation of the state of Israel and the deportation of some 750,000 Palestinians Arabs – the demographic set-up was completely changed. And the majority of Arabs replaced by Jewish one, and the Arabs within the new state of Israel became minority of 20% of the Israeli citizens, the Palestinian Arabs who remained in the state after 1948, as ―present‘s absentees‖. This Paper will examine how does the legal system of Israel analyses the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel. I will argue that they treat them as an equal to other immigrant ethnic groups, which have limited political, civilian and ethnic rights, with a partial willingness to recognize political aspects, insofar as this recognition does not infringe on the ideological structure of the state as a Jewish state. This I will address by examine the ―Kaadan‖ verdict model [Bagatz 6698/85 Adal Kaadan vs. Israel Land Administration, verdict number 54 (1) 258]. The Dilemma this paper will discuss is the possibility for equal privileges for the Arab- Palestinian minority as Native minority. Critical reading of the judgment can describe the lack of recognition of the Arab Palestinian as a native inhabitant, as a nation-building populace. A minority group that had struggled to recognize its character as a national minority, and had stoutly resisted to treat its status as an ethnic minority group, entitled solely to civilian-political rights (there had also been a similar struggle during the 1990s for equal national budgets, et cetera.) obstructed them to entitle for self-determination within the state, as opposed to an ethnic population which does not reside in its homeland. 2 A Agapiou, Scots Lawyers and ADR: A survey of attitudes and experiences ([email protected]) It is widely acknowledged that lawyers generally perform a gate-keeping role, advising clients on the most appropriate form of dispute resolution for particular cases (Agapiou & Clark, 2010). Is it reasonable to believe that the attitudes of the legal fraternity in Scotland creates a real limit on what could be implemented by a government that seeks to promote modern methods of dispute resolution as part of its civil justice reform agenda? Drawn from questionnaire -based research, the principal aim of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature and establish baseline data on Scots lawyers‘ awareness, attitudes and experiences relative to ADR in construction disputes. There is evidence from the survey that more education in ADR procedures and their application could provide further opportunity to develop them as settlement tools in Scotland by building on more positive aspects of responses within the survey sample. Only some in the legal fraternity have embraced the challenge of what the study has found to be regarded widely as an opportunity. Further education, training and publication of successful execution may be necessary to convince doubters that ADR needs to be part of the menu of methods of dispute resolution for the modern practitioner. Chioma Agomo & Rhoda Asikia Ige, Teaching Gender Studies in an African University: Prospects and Challenges ([email protected]; [email protected]/[email protected]) The teaching of Gender as a subject in the University Curriculum in most part of the developed world attained prominence in the 1970s and the 1980s with the proliferation of Departments of Women's Studies or Gender Studies. In Africa, there has been a slow response to the discipline of Women's Studies or Gender Studies. However, the 1990s witnessed the emergence of Centres for Women's Studies or Department of Women's Studies in some African Universities notably University of Ibadan Nigeria, Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife in Nigeria, University of Cape Town South Africa and Makerere University, Uganda. The paper will contribute to the debate about the slow response of African Academics to the theory and practice of Gender in African Universities. The paper therefore will chronicle the experience of law academics at the University. Paul Almond, Communication and Social Regulation: The Criminalization of Work-Related Death This paper will address the movement towards the use of the criminal law as a tool for the regulation of work-related deaths, both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, which has occurred in the last twenty years. It will seek to argue that the introduction of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, and the liberalisation of modes of attribution of criminal fault to corporate bodies in other jurisdictions, can be understood as a coherent trend, and that the reasons for this trend can be traced to the role and nature of regulatory law within those societies. This is a topic of interest given that it brings together two (apparently inconsistent) concerns of criminology; a desire to achieve ‗justice‘ in relation to wrongdoing which avoids criminalisation due to power inequalities, and a concern over the potentially damaging implications of extending criminal liability into new areas. The law has typically struggled to impose criminal liability here, preferring instead to conceptualise these cases as ‗quasi-crimes‘ rather than mainstream forms of offending. The desire to break down this distinction reflects some of the limitations inherent in regulatory systems, specifically, their instrumental, rational and juridified nature. Following Habermas (1973; 1988), it will be argued that the advances in instrumental attainment achieved by regulators have been offset by a breakdown of normative legitimacy. Health and safety law, as a social entity and a legal institution, is downgraded and objectified, resulting in both a loss of effectiveness and a loss of public confidence. It will be argue that the turn to the criminal law as a regulatory tool reflects this lack of normative weight, and also the impact of social and cultural contexts upon health and safety regulation, for it is in jurisdictions with liberal market economies and majoritarian, centralised political systems that the use of criminal law in this context is most pronounced. The criminal law is a mechanism to ‗re-norm‘ the regulatory law, but in many ways, it is a crutch to offset the limitations of the regulatory law and its political context. Corporate manslaughter reforms aim to communicate loudly in contexts where regulation is constrained to ‗speak softly‘. 3 Tola Amodu, Regulatory Chaos? Obstacles to steering local activity in the context of food safety regulation ([email protected]) The limited capacity of government to steer and manipulate (sometimes with pathological outcomes) local activity is often overlooked when assertions are made that local regulatory strategies are more effective (given their inclusivity that tends towards an absence of hierarchy (Ellickson: 1991)). Thus the quest for effective regulation focuses often on the conundrum of how to harness the capacities of regulated actors (thus optimizing local knowledge) without sacrificing the benefits of control. This endeavour is exemplified in an orientation towards and the continuing interest in self-regulatory practices extending to more loosely defined frameworks and principles-based regulation. Each has been shown to run the risk of compliance deficits and counterproductive effects. On this reading the quest for overarching control can have, at best, moderate success only. What remains perplexing are the reasons for the potential for the failure. Local authority enforcement remains an area of both policy concern and academic interest. Here we see deficits in the ‗reach‘ of central oversight which can have significant practical implications. Investigation reveals a presence of a plurality of norms and cultural understandings which combine often to frustrate the prospect of regulatory efficacy. The context of food safety enforcement illustrates how different cultural understandings can inform and shape the regulatory arena causing resistance to central control. Here whilst an array of strategies are available to and used by government these are often less than effective. This paper looks at how it is that different perceptions of role and responsibility can perpetuate sites of local power beyond the reaches of central control. Georgina Andrews, Challenging Equitable Ownership when Equity is not Equality ([email protected]) This paper discusses the challenge to the recognition of equitable ownership caused by the abolition of the presumption of advancement by the Equality Act 2010. It considers whether the presumption constitutes a ‗right‘, a ‗responsibility‘, or a rule of evidence. The paper crosses traditional subject boundaries by exploring the relationship between Property Law and Trusts, Equality and Diversity, Human Rights and European Law. The presumption of advancement is an equitable doctrine which rebuts the presumption of resulting trust. Thus, a transfer of legal title without evidence of intention to transfer the equitable interest will in certain circumstances also result in the transfer of the equitable interest. The presumption of advancement discriminates on the grounds of gender. A transfer of property from husband to wife, or from father to child invokes the presumption, but a transfer from wife to husband or from mother to child does not. The Equality Act 2010 is a wide ranging statute which consolidates and extends protection from discrimination by aligning British legislation more closely with European Union law. Section 199 of the Equality Act 2010 abolishes the presumption of advancement. However, s199 is not yet in force. The wording of the section has provoked academic critics, and the Law Commission have indicated that recent case law developments require further consideration before the provisions are brought into effect. This paper explores the controversy surrounding the abolition of the presumption of advancement and considers whether, and if so, how, the abolition should be completed. Diamond Ashiagbor, Unravelling the embedded liberal bargain: Labour law in the context of EU market integration ([email protected]) This paper begins from the starting point that European economic integration with a minimalist labour law or social policy at EU level was in part made possible by virtue of strong domestic labour market and social welfare institutions. The main contention is that EU market liberalization was embedded within labour market institutions and institutions of social citizenship existing at domestic level, which served as social stabilisers to counter the effects of the far-reaching economic liberalization of the internal market and to maintain social cohesion domestically. However, I argue that the unfolding logic of the internal market in particular in the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice, and the increased heterogeneity of national social welfare systems following enlargement, together raise the issue of how well the ‗embedded liberal bargain‘ can continue to operate. This paper focuses in particular on the 4 role of the Court of Justice in a series of decisions subsequent to Laval in 2007 on the interaction between (EU) free movement rights and (national) labour law, which cast doubt on the extent to which states can retain their regulatory autonomy over labour law, or sovereignty over the territorial application of labour standards, against the backdrop of what one might call regime portability. This recent internal market jurisprudence is, arguably, exacerbating the denationalization or de-territorialization of labour law and industrial relations across EU member states, and speeding up the unravelling of the ‗embedded liberal bargain‘ in the EU. Eleanor Aspey, Labour Considerations in Utilities Procurement: The Impact of the EU Legal Regime ([email protected]) This paper examines the impact of the European Union (EU) procurement rules on the inclusion of labour policies in utilities procurement. Background: Procurement in the utilities sector is regulated by the EU with the aim of opening the procurement market to competition (the rules are mainly found in the free movement provisions of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, supported by Directive 2004/17/EC). The potential for including labour-related considerations in procurement (for example, excluding suppliers which use child labour from the procurement process) under the EU regime is unclear, with significant grey areas in the law, making including social issues legally risky. However, the pressure from, inter alia, consumers to examine such issues may mean that utilities include such policies despite the risk. Methodology: This paper will first discuss the constraints on considering labour issues in procurement and the grey areas in the law based on doctrinal research. It will then set out the result of empirical research conducted as part of the author‘s PhD, in which qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of procurement practitioners in the regulated utilities sector, examining the response of those practitioners to the EU rules in practice. Findings: The study will show the relative impact that the EU rules had on buyers‘ decisions over whether or not to include labour policies in procurement, as compared to other factors such as the cost of implementing such policies. It will also discuss the labour issues which buyers consider to be the most important and their preferred methods for including labour issues in procurement covered by the EU rules. José M. Atiles-Osoria, The Law and its Repressive Ways: An Analysis of the Use of Law as an Instrument of Repression in the Students Strikes at the University of Puerto Rico in the Years 2010 and 2011 ([email protected]) The neoliberal model of governance, public administration and conflict resolution has been mainly based on the use of state law and the creation of new legal categories to cover those situations which are not defined by the existing law. This use of law as a administrative- repressive instrument becomes hyper-visible when the state and economic elites that represents it, use it to legitimize state violence, co-opt, delegitimize and criminalize the social movements that struggle for recognition of certain rights. This situation is radicalized when conflicts occur in the context of colonized countries, where already existing colonial conflicts and confrontations between the colonial-hegemonic actor, intermediary actors and anti- colonial-counter-hegemonic actors. I understand that this conflictive duality is perfectly exemplified by the case of Puerto Rico, an U.S. colony since 113 years ago, and the most recent student strike developed at the University of Puerto Rico. During that strike process, the Puerto Rican colonized administration has use in a intense and expansive ways the criminal law, the courts and there have even been created new laws to co-opt the student manifestations and legitimize the use of violence by the law enforcement agency over the students. In this article I want to show the use of law as an instrument to depoliticized the UPR conflict and the politics itself. To do this I will present three areas of development: 1) an analysis of the socio-legal-political and economic precedents of the conflict, showing the positions of the colonized administration, students and the main reason for the current strikes; 2) I will briefly describe the uses of law and legal discourses, the court decisions and the creation of new laws by the legislative branch in order to delegitimize the university strike; 3) finally I will do an analysis of the negative effects that such legal measures will have for the 5 socio-political Puerto Rican life. Thereby, I intend to point the way for discussion on the deficiencies and impossibilities to solve socio-political conflict through a one-way; the law. José Atiles-Osoria, Reflections on Transitional Justice; For the Return of the Politics and Searching for Other Epistemologies ([email protected]) The state of exception, the enemy criminal law including laws like the Patriot Act, and transitional justice, represent the three discourses or analytical strategies that have led to overlap law with politics, resulting in a depoliticization of it. I will explore the discursive categories, the historical, epistemological and academic trends that have led transitional justice to become one of the three forms of depoliticization above presented. For these purposes, and based on a critical approach, the article will be divided in three parts: 1) I will present a general approach to the historical-epistemological perspectives and the current academic development of the concept of transitional justice. With this analysis, I shall describe the sociopolitical processes that have led to the conceptualization of the transitional justice imposed from above to below, as the leading strategy for conduct the transition to the democracy; 2) I will explore the semantic content of the concept of Transition as a socio-political discourse. Thus, I will show that the concept of Transition implies a historical-linear analysis of the processes of political transformation. What it the same, the passage from the dictatorial, authoritarian and totalitarian political system to a capitalist- liberal-democratic system, where government and the elites who represent it, are responsible for making this transition process. In this context, I have identified different discourses, strategies and socio-political positions that are excluded from the official conception of transition, such as the gender, social movements, workers, religious and minority communities perspectives; 3) Finally, this paper addresses the concept of Justice. I will exemplify the processes that result in the subordinating political practices to law, in the use of legalistic discourse and in the socio-political practices that merges or blurs with the state legal system. Also, I shall present how the legal system by dealing with actors who committed violations in the past eliminates the possibilities of spontaneous demonstrations and other forms of collective action against them. These transitional justice approaches, give rise to a proposal for (re)meaning the semantic content and the legal discourse of political process, including strategies that emerge from below, from communities and from all those who belong to the broad social and political context in transition. Ayodele Atsenuwa, Doing Justice: Plea Bargaining and Sentencing in Lagos State The 2007 Lagos State Administration of Criminal Justice Law is the first overhaul of the colonial law relating to sentencing. It introduces plea bargaining and victims‘ rights and remedies but there are concerns that these developments will undermine the integrity of the sentencing stage and ―undo justice‖ unless well-managed. The practice of plea-bargaining in Nigeria precedes this law. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has used it with judicial assent although its legality is still widely contested. A quasi plea-bargain practice has evolved in which offenders ―plea bargain‖ with victims at the police investigation stage and negotiate a ―penalty‖ (often entailing material cost to the offender and material benefit of a compensatory nature to the defendant) which is endorsed by the Police. These experiences offer insights into how sentencing may play out under the new law. EFFC cases, for example, demonstrate how inequality of justice can inure from plea-bargaining when the privileged in society are involved and this has negatively impacted public perception of sentencing. The trend in the quasi plea-bargain practice is ready acceptance of plea bargain by victims raising questions of whether vulnerability does not disadvantage them in the bargaining process so that fairness of agreements reached are questioned. The paper examines the prospects for sentencing under the new law in the light of experience and borrows lessons for remediation from other jurisdictions. 6 Rosemary Auchmuty, Integrating Socio-Legal Perspectives into Equity and Trusts This paper, consisting of thoughts towards a contribution to a forthcoming book on integrating socio-legal studies into the undergraduate law curriculum, considers how and why we might incorporate socio-legal perspectives into the teaching of the Equity & Trusts syllabus and what this might mean in terms of accessibility, relevance, and student understanding of this often difficult subject. If we think of ‗socio-legal‘ in its widest sense, incorporating insights from the humanities as well as the social sciences and also critical legal studies, there is scope for a range of different and supplementary ways of looking at topics within Equity & Trusts e.g. critiques of equity‘s alleged ‗protective‘ jurisdiction, its claim to intervene in instances of ‗unconscionable‘ behaviour, and its reluctance to interfere with established privileges e.g. of men; or an examination of equity‘s claim to effect a ‗balance‘ between personal and commercial rights. These can be tested against the information provided by sociological data (e.g. statistics of home ownership, gender roles in the home, or gender pay inequality), media reports (individual accounts of legal experiences and journalistic analyses of legal situations), commercial information and, indeed, historical and literary representations. Judgments may be read as historical documents or literary texts, focusing on authorship, audience, language, context, policy and the specific mischief to be addressed; and may be considered in terms of providing an alternative view, or instead reflecting and reinforcing the representations of other sources. The paper will consider how these perspectives could be ‗taught‘, what resources would be needed, and how they could be assessed; and finally what would be the value of a move beyond the substantive legal rules and what skills, knowledge and understandings we would hope to develop in our students. Bode Ayorinde, A Critical Analysis of Legal Control of Banking Capitalisation in Nigeria The banking industry is over a century old in Nigeria, the first bank having been established in 1883. The industry has not been stable due mainly to absence of laws in the first instance and later a combination of inadequacy of capital and lack of professionalism. The mass failure of banks before the 1952 Banking Act was blamed on the absence of laws and Regulatory Agencies. Banking laws emerged first in 1952 and then Regulatory Agencies. Several laws had since been promulgated since 1952 but the long desired stability is yet to be found in the Nation‘s banking industry. In 1996, 26 banks got liquidated in one swop. Licenses of 64 banks were revoked on January 2, 2007. The latest episode was blamed on the inability of the affected banks to garner twenty five billion naira as minimum shareholders fund. This paper critically examines the essence of adequacy of capital in the growth and stability of banking industry. It traces the history of legislation to control bank capitalization in the country and did a comparative analysis of bank capital requirements in other countries. The growth and stress in the industry during the period revealed that heavy capital alone can not engender growth and stability in the banking industry. Rather the strength of a bank lies more on professionalism and crime free environment, more than the size of capital of the banks. The paper concludes that the latest increment from N2b to N25b was too sharp an increment and was forced on the banks in a hurry which led to the closure of most banks. The paper suggests some legislative reforms to the Nigerian banking laws to prevent the abuse of its present provisions by regulatory authorities. Elif Babul, “Smells Like Translation:” Pedagogies of Human Rights and the Management of the Foreign in Turkey Governmental circles both in Turkey and Europe continue to discuss Turkey‘s European Union (EU) accession in terms beyond the single market economy and regional integration. Turkey‘s so called ―harmonization process‖ targets the country‘s political regime, emphasizing democratization, human rights and ―good governance.‖ Inspired by many anthropologists‘ continuing endeavor to explore projects and processes bearing claims to universal validity (i.e. democratization and socioeconomic development), I study human rights training programs for state officials and government workers in Turkey, held to meet the EU membership requirements. Conducted since 2002, training programs on international human 7 rights law, women‘s human rights, prevention of torture, children‘s rights etc. are run collaboratively by the Turkish government and various national/international NGOs. Human rights training programs in Turkey are ―translation processes‖ (Merry 2006), where the universal human rights discourse is reframed for application within the governmental realm in Turkey. This reframing bears significant effects on how human rights and their universality is currently registered within the Turkish official imaginary. The reforms that the government is obliged to undertake for realizing Turkey‘s pending EU membership oversee a reframing of the universal human rights as a technical bureaucratic ordering rather than a transnational moral one. Human rights, consequentially, is transformed from being a medium of radical political action to one of apolitical governance, contracting the space of politics, and putting the human rights movement in disadvantage. This paper analyzes the politics of simultaneous translation in human rights seminars for state officials and government workers. It focuses on translators and the work of translation as windows onto the learning experience. I argue that translation processes serve as mediums through which human rights and their foreign origin are both mediated and managed in highly nationalist training environments. Rebecca Badejogbin, The Emerging Paradigm of Clinical Legal Education in Nigeria: The Nigerian Law School as a Case Study ([email protected]) Clinical legal education, a teaching method that adopts a technique which enables law students to learn by doing has gained adoption in a host of jurisdictions for decades. In a bid to institutionalize Clinical Legal Education in Nigeria, several colloquiums have been organized by stake holders from as far back as 2001 till date with many more slated for the near future. These concerted efforts to improve legal education appear to be quite comprehensive. The Nigerian Law School the sole institution that provides vocational training for law graduates who wish to practice law in Nigeria is just at the moment undergoing major reformations in its curriculum after producing well over 60, 000 lawyers since its inception. This is the first since 1959 in response to the compelling need to change legal education in significant ways albeit past achievements; by developing a simulation based, empirically relevant curriculum with contents and methodology that can most effectively prepare students for practice. This is a marked deviation from its former curriculum which teaches less skills and heavy doctrinal content. Remarkably, within a short time, giant strides have been taken to prepare for the full adoption of this marked change in curriculum. Despite the progress made so far, there are current core and structural problems which cannot be ignored in order to achieve a more adequate and properly formative legal education to the over 4,000 students enrolled at the Law School every year for the one year vocational program. This paper will therefore dwell on the progress made thus far in the adoption of this new curriculum, the problems currently being encountered and the hitches to be surmounted in order to achieve the best practice for the Nigerian Law School. It is undeniably a ‗historic opportunity to advance legal education‘ in Nigeria. Anna Bagnoli, A.L. Keeling, A.J. Holland, M. Redley, M.J. Gunn, F. Thompson and I.C.H. Clare, Applications for Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards authorisations: practitioners‟ decisions and the everyday practice of form-filling ([email protected]) The Deciding about Deprivations of Liberty (DECIDE) Project, funded by the Department of Health, is being carried out at the Cambridge Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities Research Group, University of Cambridge, to investigate the interface between the Mental Capacity Act Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards and the Mental Health Act. As part of this project, we have examined the application forms that must be completed for Standard Authorisations (Form 4) and Best Interests Assessments (Form 10), from three different areas of England. This presentation will focus on the qualitative analysis of these forms, carried out with the aid of Atlas.ti software, with particular attention to themes and to the practitioners‘ use of language. We will highlight the issues that are emerging as crucial in practitioners‘ decision- making and to the practical issues involved in this rather cumbersome task. 8 Estella Baker, Visions of the future: EU penal policy in the post-Lisbon era ([email protected]) Following hot on the heels of the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Council adopted the Stockholm Programme: the third five year programme to turn the EU into an area of freedom, security and justice ["AFSJ"]. Between them, these two events usher in a new era of Union engagement in the penal field and the texts therefore offer a certain kind of vision of the future. However, as products of the political bargaining process, its candour and ambition is necessarily constrained by the need to reach a sufficient consensus for the bargaining process to be concluded. By contrast, since their adoption, a number of senior figures have made public statements that provide more enriched visions of the Union's penal future and the place of the AFSJ in the scheme of its affairs. Some, such as the policy pronouncements by the Justice Commissioner, Viviane Reding, are directed at this very objective. Others, such as observations made by Advocates General in the course of relevant Opinions, are more tangential, although it does not follow that they are any the less far sighted. Taking the post-Lisbon treaties and the Stockholm Programme as its foundation, this paper will examine the ways in which these formal texts have unleashed the potential for deeper, intensified visions of the Union's penal role to come to the fore. How plausible are they? And what are their implications for the ongoing constitutionalising process, and for the prospective nature and character of the Union as a whole? Richard Ball, Legitimacy of EU Law ([email protected]) Much of the focus of debates on legitimacy in the past has centred on democracy and the so-called democratic deficit when analysing the polity of the EU and its laws. However, according to Scharpf there are two aspects of legitimacy, input and output-oriented legitimisation. The former has been filled predominantly with the debate on democracy and has been described as emphasising ―government by the people‖ whilst the latter has received little attention and can be described as ―government for the people‖. The measurement of input-orientated legitimisation can be assessed through elections and the voting procedure but the measurement of output-orientated legitimisation has proven less forthcoming. It is submitted that political actions and their legitimacy, grounded in legal doctrine, can be analysed through the principles of legal rationality. Thus for Union legal doctrine to be rational it must display the requirements of formal, instrumental and substantive rationality, each mutually exclusive and essential, and examined within the relative political context. This paper will outline a model within which the EU‘s political actions can be analysed for legitimacy. Andrea Ballestero, The Pricing of a human right: Water, Profit Control, and Ethics in Costa Rica ([email protected]) The last 20 years have witnessed an intense period of reform in the water sectors of most developing countries. Strong privatization programs implemented in the 1990s in Latin America left the region with a sour taste for making water ―private‖ and with growing social skepticism toward policies that overtly transferred water management and/or ownership to the private sector. In the new millennium, however, the privatization rhetoric has lost purchase and none of the former international promoters of the approach feel compelled to aggressively uphold its policy significance. Furthermore, after the 2002 and 2010 commitments by the UN to recognize water access as a human right any discussion of policy involves mechanisms for the implementation of such right. This has required new articulations of notions of the private/public domain, human rights, and modalities of capitalist pricing. In this context, economic regulatory agencies overseeing the provision of public services, such as ARESEP in Costa Rica, are facing the challenge of creating pricing mechanisms that can speak both to the notion of human rights and to the capitalist logics of value creation. In that context, this paper asks how do ethical commitments by non-judicial actors shape rights regimes? I examine the case of Costa Rica, a country characterized by an anti-shock reform style and a strong social-democratic State. While rejecting overtly privatizing measures, and recognizing water access as a human right through its constitutional court, the country has committed to increase the price of water services by 150% from its 2005 level. I examine this 9 apparent contradiction by following economic regulators in the design and implementation of an ―ethical‖ pricing system and explore the techniques they use to ―control profits‖ as a way to be consistent with what they understand as the ethos of human rights. Anne Barlow, Pre-Nuptial Agreements and the Reconstruction of Fairness ([email protected]) In the light of the Supreme Court‘s decision in Radmacher v Granatino [2010] UKSC 42 on the current law of pre-nuptial agreements and the Law Commission‘s recent consultation paper Marital Property Agreements (CP198), this paper looks at the relative merits of autonomy, certainty and judicially ascribed fairness in financial provision on divorce in the light of public attitudes to these issues. Drawing on an empirical study comprising a nationally representative sample and a qualitative follow-up study, it will consider whether the implications of binding pre-nuptial agreements may be gendered, assess any shift in judicial and societal thinking on ‗fairness‘ in this context and reflect on what reform might mean for the concept of marriage in wider society. Lucy Barnes, Individualising the „Big Society‟: We are all in this (for ourselves) Together? ([email protected]) This paper considers the termination of lifelong tenancies in the context of the coalition‘s ‗Big Society‘ agenda, arguing that the removal of lifelong tenancies will create considerable difficulty in establishing some aspects of the ‗Big Society‘ (whether or not this is desirable) within social housing communities. It will be argued that the removal of lifelong tenancies would create changeable communities characterised by high residential turnover, which thus decrease the potential for generating some of the collaborative networked projects identified by David Cameron as demonstrative of the ‗Big Society‘. These projects may only continue to be viable if we identify the individual him or herself as the unit by which the ‗Big Society‘ is to be measured, yet, this ‗individualism‘ may not necessarily correspond well with the coalitions‘ premise that ―we are all in this together‖. Thus, this paper argues that whilst Cameron‘s ‗Big Society‘ policy may refer to communities as sites of social entrepreneurial initiative, it is, rather, the individual who is to be ‗networked‘ with other individuals. Social housing is therefore envisaged within state policy as a site of multiple make-shift communities of individuals, which may appear rather antithetical with some of the broader aims of ‗Big Society‘, yet resonant with some previous Conservative administration initiatives in social policy. Peter Bartlett, Is there a Future for Wilkinson Hearings? In 2001, the Court of Appeal held in R (Wilkinson) v Broadmoor that judicial review of decisions to treat psychiatric patients without consent were judicially reviewable under the Human Rights Act 1998. Since that time, few cases have been brought, and none have been successful. This paper considers the potential for Wilkinson hearings. In particular, it looks to the case law both nationally and at the European level, to determine what sorts of criteria should govern the use of compulsory treatment. By arguing that, at least implicitly, there are legal standards that should be met for compulsory treatment, the paper provides a framework for courts to consider Wilkinson-type cases. John Bates, Push me/Pull you? Tensions in establishing negligence liability of sports instructors and coaches ([email protected]) In two recent cases (Anderson –v- Lyotier (t/a Snowbizz) [2008] EWHC 2790 (QB) and Gouldborn –v- Balkan Holidays Ltd [2010] EWCA Civ 372), the courts have considered the nature of the duty of care in negligence, and the corresponding standard of care, owed by sports instructors to pupils. Both cases involved ski-ing, but the principles under discussion are of wider impact to coaches engaged in professional and amateur instruction of pupils who willingly seek that coaching and training to improve and develop their skills In sports and recreational activities which may naturally carry a risk of injury without any breach of any duty of care by anyone. The duty of care in negligence does not exist in a vacuum, and there are important tensions in principle and practice when considering whether an instructor (along with, by extension of 10