‘Residents of two Nigerian communities who are taking legal action against Shell over oil pollution are set to take their cases to trial at the high court in 2027.’

Full Story

The Guardian, 20th June 2025

Source: www.theguardian.com

‘Most women in law (88%) believe sex discrimination is still prevalent in the profession, with 63% saying they had personally experienced it in the last five years, new research has shown.’

Full Story

Legal Futures, 23rd June 2025

Source: www.legalfutures.co.uk

‘There has been significant commentary on UK Supreme Court’s (UKSC) decision which held that the terms “man”, “woman” and “sex” under the Equality Act 2010 (EA) only refer to a cisgender man/cisgender woman. However, there is scope to assess what role separate grounds of ‘sex’ and ‘gender reassignment’ under the EA played in the court’s narrow interpretation of ‘sex’ as “biological”, sex (birth-assigned sex).’

Full Story

Oxford Human Rights Hub, 23rd June 2025

Source: ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk

‘Terminally ill people in England and Wales are to be given the right to an assisted death in a historic societal shift that will transform end-of-life care.’

Full Story

The Guardian, 20th June 2025

Source: www.theguardian.com

‘While legislation and administrative frameworks shape how landowners own or use their land, land law continues to be understood primarily as a private law subject. Public interventions are conventionally treated as outside land law’s remit and are rarely addressed in property theorization. Responding to this absence, this article outlines the scope of public land law—understood as the governance of land by the state in the public interest—introducing the concept of property as authorized, where land ownership and use are limited by authorization. The analysis draws on examples from planning, leasehold reform, and public access legislation, alongside human rights protections under Article 1 of Protocol 1 (A1P1) of the ECHR and the newly recognized fundamental common law right to property, to show how public and private land law both constitute property. By examining these interactions, the article encourages greater engagement with public land law to understand how land law operates today.’

Full Story

Current Legal Problems, 16th June 2025

Source: academic.oup.com

‘The Single Justice Procedure (SJP / the Procedure) was introduced by the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, its purpose being to hear high-volume, low-level, non-imprisonable offences swiftly. In the past decade, millions of cases have been dealt with under the SJP. The most recently published data shows that in one quarter alone, 182,902 defendants were dealt with via the SJP. That was 64% of all defendants in the Magistrates’ Courts in that quarter.’

Full Story

2 Hare Court, 11th June 2025

Source: www.2harecourt.com

‘Three NHS workers have launched legal action against an NHS trust claiming that a new uniform policy unlawfully discriminates against them – and is in breach of the Equality Act 2010 – because of their pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist beliefs.’

Full Story

Local Government Lawyer, 19th June 2025

Source: www.localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk

‘The judgment represents a very rare example of where the court has found that there was an intention to create legal relations in a domestic context. It also provides important guidance relating to mental capacity, which was of particular relevance in this claim given the claimant’s mother’s diagnosis with dementia.’

Full Story

4 KBW, 9th June 2025

Source: www.4kbw.co.uk

‘In this paper, I explore the notion of public interest embedded in the Procurement Act 2023. I use this new piece of post-Brexit legislation as a contemporary example of the difficulty in designing a ‘public interest centred’ system of public procurement regulation. I show how a mix of partly overlapping explicit, referential, and implicit public interest goals results in a situation where there are multiple sources of objectives contracting authorities need to consider in their decision-making, but there is no prioritisation of sources or objectives. I also show that, despite this kaleidoscopic proliferation of sources and objectives, and due to the unavailability of effective means of judicial challenge or administrative oversight, contracting authorities retain almost unlimited discretion to shape the public interest and ‘what it looks like’ in relation to the award of each public contract. This challenges the centralised approach to procurement policy taken by recent and current UK Governments and, in particular, raises significant questions on the likely effectiveness of ‘mission-driven’ procurement. I close with a call to reconsider how public procurement can foster the public interest, in light of its limitations as a regulatory tool.’

Full Story

Legal Studies, 17th June 2025

Source: www.cambridge.org

‘A psychologist who was found to have misled the family court about his qualifications had previously given expert evidence in at least seven other cases in which he may have been acting outside his remit.’

Full Story

The Guardian, 19th June 2025

Source: www.theguardian.com

‘Edward Sawyer of Wilberforce Chambers revisits s 37/reg 42 and the Virgin Media litigation, describing the main s 37/reg 42 issues debated during the recent Verity Trustees trial and looking at how the proposed new legislation might potentially interact with those issues.’

Full Story

Pensions Barristers, 19th June 2025

Source: www.pensionsbarrister.com

‘The attorney general has warned Sir Keir Starmer that Britain becoming involved in US attacks on Iran could be illegal.’

Full Story

The Independent, 19th June 2025

Source: www.independent.co.uk

The assessment of Scope 3 downstream emissions from oil and gas production has been the subject of litigation in the United Kingdom for many years with environmental campaigners calling for its inclusion into the environmental impact assessment, and the authorities and the industry maintaining that these emissions are outside the scope of the assessment. The dispute appears to have been resolved by the UK Supreme Court decision in Finch v Surrey County Council [2024] UKSC 20, which established that emissions resulting from burning the produced oil and gas – wherever that takes place – must be considered in the environmental impact assessment. Together with the Labour Government’s platform of no new oil and gas exploration, the decision delivered hope to climate campaigners and despair to the oil and gas industry. This analysis reviews the Finch decision with a focus on its legal significance and practical implications for the UK energy sector and beyond.

Full Story

Journal of Environmental Law, 17th June 2025

Source: academic.oup.com

‘This is the first in a three-part analysis of R (ALR and others) v Chancellor of the Exchequer [2025] EWHC 1467 (Admin). In this post, I cover the constitutional aspects of the judgment, in particular its Annex B on parliamentary privilege and Article IX of the Bill of Rights. The second and third posts in this series will feature the ECHR and implications for Northern Ireland under EU law.’

Full Story

Administrative Court Blog, 19th June 2025

Source: administrativecourtblog.wordpress.com

‘Former health secretary Sir Jeremy Hunt has called for an “urgent re-examination” of the Lucy Letby case after “serious and credible” questions were raised by experts.’

Full Story

BBC News, 18th June 2025

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

‘A serial rapist feared to be one of the worst sexual offenders in British history has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 24 years for drugging and raping 10 women in the UK and China.’

Full Story

The Guardian, 19th June 2025

Source: www.theguardian.com

‘Universities in England will no longer be able to enforce blanket bans on student protests under sweeping new guidance that urges a “very strong” approach to permitting lawful speech on campus.’

Full Story

The Guardian, 19th June 2025

Source: www.theguardian.com