This reflection considers the power dynamics that shape how neurodiversity is recognised, disclosed and managed in legal education and during entry to the legal profession. Rather than offering a comprehensive empirical account, I use the piece to reflect on a question that has increasingly troubled me as a legal educator: when we describe our institutions as inclusive, how much of that inclusion still depends upon the individual student making themselves legible to us? Drawing on critical disability scholarship, Foucauldian ideas of power and knowledge, and developments in legal education, I argue that disclosure-based systems can place a disproportionate burden on neurodivergent students to identify, evidence and explain their difference before support becomes available. I consider non-disclosure and non-diagnosis, the way universities communicate support, and the continuities between legal education and professional recruitment. My central reflection is that inclusion cannot depend solely upon ever more efficient processes for granting individual adjustments. Legal educators should also ask what features of our ordinary teaching, assessment and professional expectations create the need for disclosure in the first place. The piece therefore argues for a shift from reactive accommodation towards more anticipatory and structurally inclusive approaches, while recognising that individual adjustments will remain important.
The object of this commentary is to consider the above case with regard to the concepts of defamation, reputation and the reasonable person criterion. It will also briefly consider the award of costs. The commentary is divided into three sections. The first will outline the background out of which Mr Burke’s defamation action arose. The second will detail the arguments of the parties, the judgment and the award of costs. Finally, a case commentary will consider the concepts of defamation, reputation, the reasonable person, non-violent civil disobedience and the rule of law. It will also suggest that the impugned article was defamatory and that the plaintiff had a reputation to defend.
One of the most significant developments in relation to domestic abuse has been the emergence of the ‘coercive control’ framework and the enactment of a specific criminal offence thereof at section 76 Serious Crime Act 2015. The recent Jackson case was the first opportunity to see whether and how this framework, and the enactment of section 76, would inform the operation of the partial ‘loss of control’ defence as set out in section 54 Coroners and Justice Act 2009. This defence was, itself, introduced in response to the enduring criticisms directed at the previous ‘provocation’ defence when relied on in cases where abused women had killed abusers. In this article, I argue that, in its ruling in Jackson, the Court of Appeal has failed to take the opportunity to draw on this increasingly mainstreamed framing of domestic abuse as climatic, processual and continuing and to promote this framing when women kill abusers but rather has colluded in a narrative that prioritises domestic abuse as repeated incidents. In upholding this narrow approach to harm, the ruling underlines the continuing difficulties faced by abused women in relying on the loss of control defence but also puts the section 54 framework at odds with that at section 76.
