Prosecutors in England and Wales may start or continue a prosecution only if to do so is in the public interest. No general account has previously been given, however, of what the public interest consists in. This paper aims to provide such an account, drawing on a study of all policies and guidance published by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Its principal conclusion is that, in most cases, CPS guidance imposes on prosecutors an obligation to seek an appropriate penalty for those against whom there is sufficient evidence. In more serious cases, this obligation effectively renders prosecution mandatory. In less serious cases, it may be outweighed by countervailing factors, and out-of-court disposals may constitute an appropriate penalty. However, only a limited range of factors are clearly recognised as counting against prosecution. CPS guidance also lacks clear principles regarding when prosecutors may exceptionally pursue non-punitive aims.
This paper integrates empirical and doctrinal approaches to demystify the intellectual property law Typical Case system in China. IP Typical Cases have proliferated nationwide, yet their institutional meaning - particularly what makes them 'typical' and what functions they are intended to serve - remains obscure. Normative documents suggest a dual purpose: doctrinally, to unify the application of law across similar cases; and socially, to promote law popularisation and support broader social governance. This dual intention aligns with the findings from a semantic network analysis based on a large-N Weibo dataset, which reveals that IP Typical Cases embody economic, political, and legal dimensions. However, policymakers have overlooked the inherent tension between these functions: the legal function requires the doctrinal complexity of hard cases, whereas the societal function depends on simple, communicable cases suitable for public education. Given the predominance of non-hard cases and the pre-existing ambiguity surrounding the system's intended purpose, the current IP Typical Case system struggles to realise either objective effectively. A clear recognition of the hard-simple division could enable the system to function more coherently, contributing both to the development of China's case guidance system and, more narrowly, to the formation of IP legal dogmatics.
Software as a medical device (SaMD) offer significant promise for care and have become near ubiquitous within healthcare and medicine. Yet, the regulation of SaMD in the UK and Europe has not kept up with the technological state-of-the-art. In this paper we argue that there is a conceptual mismatch between regulatory frameworks designed for physical devices and the intangible nature of software. To demonstrate this, we identify three key gaps in the application of medical devices regulations to SaMD: (1) how the 'intended use' of digital devices impacts on whether they are captured by the relevant Regulations; (2) the problems created by the boundaryless nature of software for determining the device 'manufacturer'; and (3) the challenges of managing changes to SaMD, especially where these are updated rapidly and frequently. Whilst recognising that recently published guidance and planned proposals to update medical devices regulation in the UK and EU attempt to address these challenges, we argue that they do not go far enough. Namely, they fail to properly attend to the foundational mismatch at the heart of regulating SaMD. In response, we propose three potential solutions to ensure that any forthcoming regulatory changes appropriately capture the nuances and risks specific to software.
In Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia , the Supreme Court of Canada took the unprecedented step of inaugurating a novel ‘tort of intimate partner violence’ targeting coercive control. 1 In giving benediction to this new nominate tort, the judgment charts a creative path for the law of torts in Canada, which will be of interest to Anglo-Commonwealth scholars and jurists more broadly. This comment highlights the principal innovative aspects of the Court’s decision, while identifying some analytical issues in its reasoning and cautioning against its uncritical adoption.
On 14 November 2025, the High Court of England and Wales handed down judgment in the largest environmental mass tort in UK history: the group claim by more than 600,000 Brazilian victims of the 2015 collapse of the Fundão tailings dam against the mining giant BHP Group. In Município de Mariana v BHP Group , the Court found BHP (through its UK and Australian-listed parent companies) liable on both strict liability and negligence grounds under Brazilian law. 1
