Marc Johnson

It is often thought that affording rights is a progressive movement; rights are given to natural legal persons; the rights are normalised in societal expectations and they form part of a body of enforceable rights against the state. On the 7th February 2018, Bermuda became the first state in modern history to withdraw the right of same-sex couples to marry, bucking the trend of progressively affording rights. In a recent judgment, the Bermudian Supreme Court has ruled that taking away the right of same-sex couples to marry is unconstitutional. This article will briefly consider the development of the right of same-sex couples to marry in Bermuda, the connection between Bermudian human rights law and the European Convention on Human Rights and ask whether rights afforded under a constitutional arrangement can be taken away.

This article re-examines the orthodox Diceyan conception of parliamentary sovereignty in light of contemporary constitutional principle and practice in the United Kingdom. It argues that the traditional claim that Parliament may legislate without legal limitation remains doctrinally influential but is no longer an adequate account of legislative authority within a constitutional order committed to the rule of law. The article contends that sovereignty should not be understood as an inherent or absolute attribute of Parliament, but as a contingent and legally mediated form of authority, sustained through recognition within the legal order and bounded by the constitutional requirements of legality, accountability, and access to justice. Rather than treating Parliament as a monolithic constitutional actor, the article analyses legislation as the product of individual parliamentarians acting within structures of party discipline, executive dominance, and electoral distortion. On that basis, it argues that the language of sovereign Parliament obscures the reality that law-making power is exercised by identifiable political actors whose authority requires legal constraint. It develops this claim through public law doctrine and constitutional theory, including the rule of recognition, the grundnorm, social contract thought, and contemporary jurisprudence on legality and ouster clauses. The article concludes that the better view is not that the rule of law bends to parliamentary sovereignty, but that Parliament’s legislative authority is itself conditioned by the rule of law and by the constitutional limits necessary to secure democratic legitimacy. In that sense, the article advances a redefined account of parliamentary sovereignty suited to the modern constitutional framework of the United Kingdom.

Current debates in Clinical Legal Education (CLE) exclude essay writing as a legitimate form of ‘clinical’ pedagogy. This article argues that essay writing should be classified as a form of CLE due to its potential to mirror legal practice and enhance students' reflective capacities. By incorporating Hegelian dialectical reasoning, the paper proposes a structured approach to legal essay writing that includes thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This method encourages students to engage deeply with legal arguments, reflecting on their merits and counterarguments. The dialectical approach aligns with constructivist teaching methodologies, promoting critical thinking and practical skills relevant to legal practice and beyond. The article outlines the theoretical basis of this model and provides a practical framework for its implementation in legal education. It further connects this pedagogical strategy to the development of transferable skills that prepare students for professional legal environments. Through this dialectical method, the paper advocates for a more holistic and nuanced understanding of legal concepts, bridging the gap between academic theory and practical application, and, thus, making the case for the incorporation of Hegel-inspired essay writing into the definition of CLE.

On 4 December 2006, during discussions on the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, Andrew Dismore, Member of Parliament and then Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, said, ‘Organisations can kill people … but it is the actions and omissions of people in organisations that cumulatively cause death’. However, the corporate entity is a vehicle for the communal actions of those who guide the business activities. Attempting to seek out persons or people that are solely responsible for deaths and violations of human rights caused by companies is fruitless. The entity is a vehicle for those actions, it possesses its own, often deep, pockets of finance and resources, and it has a public image. It is more useful to punish the corporate entity, in instances where the corporate behaviour has led to death and human rights abuses, as it is in seeking out individual defendants. Soft law options have not brought about a sufficient reduction in instances of deaths caused by corporate behaviour across jurisdictional borders. This article will argue that the time has now come to establish an international hard law on corporate killing, and for states to ensure that there is a viable path towards a redress for victims and their families along with adopting a duty to assist the victim or their family to pursue redress to ensure a fair balance of power against transnational companies.

Clinical Legal Education programmes now take place in most law schools in England and Wales. However, legal education continues to be predominantly focused on the analysis and application of rules, doctrines, and theories to hypothetical scenarios or essay questions. This form of pedagogy either minimises or ignores the role of the client in terms of supplying lawyers with knowledge pertinent to their case. In other words, it overlooks the fact that the lawyer’s acquisition of knowledge is not confined to technical rationality. This article seeks to achieve three broad aims. First, to contribute to the debate concerning the epistemology of reflective practice. Second, to develop a theoretical reflective cycle, informed by Kant’s transcendental idealism, which seeks to maximise knowledge acquisition in legal education, namely knowledge supplied by the client. Third, to address implicit bias using the proposed reflective cycle. An optimal pedagogy for using this cycle is Clinical Legal Education, namely live client clinics.

Legislative sovereignty is often discussed with one eye on the past and one eye on the procedural functions of law-making in the present. This limits the scope for a conceptual understanding of legislative sovereignty and hinders its theoretical progress. This article argues that legislative sovereignty contains within it the concept of an idol and that understanding the scope and impact of the idol of sovereignty is necessary for future development in this field. Theories from Kant, Nietzsche, von Mises and Derrida are used to offer a divergent critique of legislative sovereignty while the author calls for a move towards a nuanced view of legislative and Parliamentary Sovereignty to account for its idolism. The key factor preventing the development of a truly nuanced and reflective theory of sovereignty is the devotion to former idols which are inoperable and inconsistent with modern geopolitical, inter-state relationships. The author also argues that our knowledge of sovereignty is synthetic a priori and that development in this area can only be by reason, as knowledge derived experientially is subject to the Kantian Transcendental Idealism.