The decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Rubis Bahamas Ltd v Russell is the most significant development in the law of Rylands v Fletcher for decades. Rejecting the view that the rule is merely a sub‐species of private nuisance, the Committee reconstructed it as an independent rule of strict liability governing harm caused by exceptionally dangerous things. This note argues that the recharacterisation is largely welcome. It restores coherence to the relationship between Rylands v Fletcher , nuisance and negligence, and supports the actionability of personal injury. At the same time, the note questions the continued significance of land and the escape requirement once liability is understood as resting on the creation of exceptional risks of harm. It further argues that the Committee's formulation of the dangerousness requirement leaves unresolved questions about the interaction between the probability and severity of harm, while questioning the extent to which the specialised‐use requirement performs independent work. Finally, the note contends that the Committee's justificatory analysis, although a valuable starting point, falls short of providing a satisfactory theoretical foundation for the reconstructed doctrine. The decision nevertheless marks a turning point in the modern law of Rylands v Fletcher .
Healthcare decision‐making under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA 2005) has long been understood as comprising two distinct, sequential decisions. First, a clinical decision about what treatment options are available. Second, a best interests decision about which (if any) of these options to proceed with. This has achieved parity with the approach to valid consent where a patient has capacity, upholding the legal principle that a particular treatment cannot be demanded where it is not considered clinically indicated. In Townsend v Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust , the Court of Appeal held that this distinction between clinical and best interests decisions is wrong. Rather, all decisions regarding the care and treatment of incapacitated adults, including those characterised as purely clinical, fall within the MCA 2005's best interests framework. This case note considers this decision, exploring three respects in which the judgment gives rise to serious difficulty. First, the inequality created between patients based on capacity. Second, the enforceability problem that is acknowledged but not resolved. Third, the pressure that will now be placed on both the Court of Protection and clinical practice, including the risk that the decision incentivises a litigation‐averse instrumentalisation of patients.
Exemplary damages are commonly understood as public interest awards. This article explores the logical implications of understanding them in this way for a tort claimant's rights of action and settlement, and for the proper distribution of awards. One implication, it suggests, is that settlements, being compromises of public ends, should require court approval and the state should in principle have rights of representation in respect of the accommodation. Another is that courts should have statutory duties and powers to divert a fixed proportion of any award above a minimum threshold to approved public purposes, including, potentially, charitable ends nominated by the claimant. In making these suggestions, the article draws heavily on the way in which public interest claims are structured and controlled in public law; and on American split‐damages systems. As well as eliminating unjustified windfalls, the redistribution of exemplary awards to more imaginative public uses is likely, the article concludes, to prove attractive to governments in times when public funding is short and could fruitfully be accommodated, at least in a basic form, without significant cost.
This paper gives an account of the actus reus for a criminal attempt. Conduct that is more than merely preparatory, we argue, intrudes on the same protected domain as the complete offence. This takes a normative approach to actus reus, focusing on the reasons that the defendant acted against. It therefore breaks from the standard approach, which is to descriptively assess the causal proximity between the defendant's conduct and the completed offence.
As states and private actors expand their activities in outer space, the international legal framework governing this domain risks extending longstanding structures of global inequality beyond Earth. This article examines how international space law, shaped by a broader disciplinary pattern of reactive legal development, is poised to reproduce terrestrial disparities in the extraterrestrial realm. Drawing on parallels across international legal regimes, it demonstrates how reactive governance often disadvantages less powerful actors through various interlocking mechanisms: transforming early movers' advantages into legal prescriptions; enabling unilateral norm-setting amid international legal voids; shifting environmental burdens onto latecomers; sidelining equity concerns during crisis-driven lawmaking; and discounting foreseeable-yet-distant risks disproportionately borne by vulnerable populations. By tracing these distributive dynamics, the article underscores the need and possibility for more proactive alternatives in space governance. Though the window for action is narrowing, space law still retains enough plasticity to be reoriented before current inequalities become legally entrenched.
Machine learning (ML) systems, increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making, inherently produce uncertain outputs that can lead to unlawful discrimination. This article provides the first legal analysis of how predictive uncertainty in ML systems interacts with UK anti-discrimination law under the Equality Act 2010. Employing a decision-theoretic framework, the article distinguishes between aleatoric uncertainty, stemming from irreducible randomness, and epistemic uncertainty, arising from incomplete knowledge from deliberate model design choices. While identifying and justifying aleatoric uncertainty presents a unique challenge, given its reflection of underlying, irreducible risk external to the model, it may introduce a form of indirect discrimination unique to probabilistic systems. Intentional design decisions introduce epistemic uncertainty, which can directly and indirectly cause discriminatory outcomes. Instead of assuming ML is a 'black-box' or evaluating solely by outputs, greater legal importance should be placed on the design choices that are embedded within ML systems. Therefore, the article contends that algorithmic discrimination introduces new challenges that current legal frameworks are ill-equipped to address while also demonstrating how some aspects of unlawful discrimination are clearer in ML settings than previously thought. It also advocates for enhanced interdisciplinary interpretation of anti-discrimination doctrine with support from proactive oversight and regulatory measures beyond individual litigation.
The Football Governance Act 2025 is a watershed. It upends the model of self-regulation that has defined how the game has been run in England and Wales for over a century-and-a-half. The newly created Independent Football Regulator will exercise control over clubs, owners, and competition organisers. Rarely has a piece of legislation inspired so much hope, rarely has it generated so much pushback. Drawing on regulation scholarship, this article poses two sets of questions. First, what does the reform tell us about the current state of regulation in the UK, and why has this attempt at intervening in the game worked when so many previous attempts had failed? Second, can the regulator fix the ills of football and, if so, which ones?
This paper proposes a new framework for analysis of the law governing State continuity, with particular reference to Small Island Developing States (SIDS) threatened with legal extinction as a result of rising sea-levels. Prevailing wisdom suggests that if States were to lose their inhabitable land or permanently resident populations, their status under international law would thereby lapse. On such accounts, international law is presumed to be a collection of established norms responding 'neutrally', as it were, to the purely physical phenomenon of sea-level rise. This paper rejects that view, advancing an account of State vulnerability and resilience that draws upon Martha Albertson Fineman's conception of the 'vulnerable subject' and the 'responsive state' within the domestic legal context. By making a shift of scale within vulnerability theory from 'individuals and the state' to 'States and the international legal order', all States themselves (that is, in addition to all individuals) can be conceptualised as vulnerable artificial entities in relation to which international law can be more or less 'responsive'. From this perspective, the existential resilience of States must be recognised as contingent upon international law's institutional and regulatory structure, which itself results from the collective choices and ongoing dispositions of States themselves.
This note analyses the Court of Appeal decision in R v Hobday in the context of the longstanding but controversial caselaw on the relevance of consent to offences of assault occasioning actual bodily harm (ABH) or above. It considers whether the vulnerabilities of victims of gender-based violence are adequately recognised by the judiciary in an area where legislation, it is argued, has fallen short.
Drawing on the theory of practical reasons, John Gardner has offered a seminal account of excuses in criminal law. His proposal is that an excuse asserts that the defendant acted for what she justifiably believed to be sufficient reason for her to perform the offending act although she had no such reason. Despite its theoretical insights, I argue that this account leads to untenable results in certain cases which gives us a strong reason to reject it; this is because it is built on the view that what we have reason to do is determined by all facts relevant to the choiceworthiness of our actions regardless of our epistemic perspective about these facts. Interestingly, Gardner had once anticipated this potential response to his proposal but had dismissed it as a 'nuclear option'. This article triggers it.
This paper explores how the affordability of rents is addressed in the long-anticipated reform of the English private rental sector (PRS) by the Renters' Rights Act 2025. The PRS has doubled in size since 2010, acting as a social housing substitute for some households. Its tenants spend the highest proportion of income on housing costs, with unaffordable rents acting as a driver of poverty. The paper uses key themes from housing studies literature on neoliberalism to track the shift of liability for housing costs to tenants, along with the concomitant creation of opportunities for others to invest in private landlordism to fund their future welfare. Comparing the Conservatives' Renters (Reform) Bill with the Labour Government's Renters' Rights Act reveals that, despite cross-party recognition of affordability as a fundamental problem, there is political unanimity around preserving market rents, and political consensus to maintain current minimal protections against above-market rent increases. This mechanism requires individual tenants to guard against economic eviction by initiating adjudicative action. Overall, there is remarkable continuity with the preceding four decades that have been dominated by neoliberal-inspired policies. The identified failure to depart from the market-dominated consumerist trajectory threatens the improved security of tenure that the Act promises.
The UK Supreme Court's judgment in In the matter of an application by JR87 and another for Judicial Review, that religious education in Northern Ireland breached the Human Rights Act 1998, turned in significant part on a disconnect between statutory rights and administrative reality. While the judgment is a landmark in the history of the teaching of religion in state schools in Northern Ireland and a significant case in the growing corpus of human rights jurisprudence on religious education, this case note demonstrates how it also reveals the neglected salience of administrative burden - an idea central to public administration theory - to the practice of contemporary public law.
This article traces the shifting relationship between the courts, the public, and the media in England and Wales from the 1925 prohibition on courtroom photography to the contemporary regime of livestreamed and recorded proceedings. It situates the introduction of the ban on courtroom images within the first administrative turn of the judiciary, when mechanised record-keeping and the increasing use of photography by the mass media threatened to destabilise judicial authority, existing class relations, and the courts' control over judicial meaning-making. A century later, the return of cameras to the courtroom is analysed as part of a second administrative turn driven by digitalisation, datafication, and the transparency imperative. Rather than signalling a liberalisation of visual access, the reintroduction of cameras has been contingent on the judiciary's enhanced capacity to produce and control its own 'administrative images'. Today, images of the courtroom operate simultaneously as instruments of surveillance and sources of data within a broader digital infrastructure of governance. The article argues that contemporary open justice, increasingly equated with transparency, no longer rests primarily on public observation of courts but on managed visibility through digital capture, thereby recasting the historic tension between law and images within the logic of algorithmic and data-driven judicial administration.
