A useful reminder from the Court of Appeal today:
"Deference to the judgment of the legislature cannot be taken too far in the context of equality and discrimination cases... it is an important function of the courts to protect minorities, in particular small and perhaps unpopular minorities..."
This is great. Good to finally have a podcast dedicated to ECHR stuff to keep me occupied on my long commute! (Excellent episode ft @cohelongo.bsky.social)
strasbourgobservers.com/2026/02/23/c...
Tragic manslaughter case with potential chilling effect on mountain sports. What is more interesting is that the judge is a mountaineer himself and mountain rescuer.
www.derstandard.at/story/300000...
I have just discovered fake citations in a peer-reviewed article (quite a few of them). These are invented articles attributed to real scholars, clearly the result of a scholar being incredibly lazy with AI. What's the proper response?
It is a straw man in the sense that PEX takes the argument at its very worst rather than at its best. They adopt the least charitable reading possible. Sure, some people misunderstand the 'this puts us in the same camp as Russia' argument, but there are plenty who mean something reasonable.
Spot on. No one really thinks leaving the ECHR would make us equivalent to Russia. The point is that it sets a bad example for other states and undermines the authority of the ECHR. PEX is attacking a straw man and missing the real point.
Can I ask what you have in mind when you talk about the contractualist turn in legal philosophy? I thought it was pretty dead (for exactly the reasons you mention) but interested to hear what I might have missed.
I conjecture that philosophers are more comfortable separating the artist from their art because basically everyone we study was an asshole. If you refused to read any philosopher that had despicable opinions, you'd be left with like three of them.
All those I have read were good. Think you might’ve been unlucky. Liz Fisher’s one on Environmental Law stands out as being especially good.
Nice to see I’m not the only human rights law academic who appreciates Fuschia’s great genius! (With bonus pictures of Laziji and some Liangban from her ‘The Food of Sichuan’ that I made on Sunday).
The video says it has been removed by the uploader. Do you know if a new version will be uploaded, or has it been taken down permanently?
Please help me get the word out about the new websites for Legal Theory Blog and the Legal Theory Lexicon. Reposting here and on other social media sites is great. It would be especially helpful if law school faculty members could send an email to their colleagues with the new addresses.
Thanks very much!
Hi Shoaib. Do you know if there’s a written version of this, or if there will be in the future? Thanks
An Open Access version of this paper is available here: eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/22...
This might be read alongside this excellent update bsky.app/profile/ejil...
My new article on Climate Change Litigation under the ECHR is out in @echr-law-review.bsky.social. (Thanks to my colleagues @lancasterlaw.bsky.social and @cohelongo.bsky.social for comments.)
brill.com/view/journal...
The amount of time it takes to mark an essay has easily doubled since AI as I am finding myself trawling through footnotes, Google, and my university library database to double-check that the articles and books cited actually exist.
Thanks AI-- you've really increased my productivity.
One option is to bite the bullet and say that proportionality is a utilitarian doctrine, which is exactly what I claim here academic.oup.com/hrlr/article...
Lake with mountains beyond. An old fence going down to the water. Cloudy sky.
20 bird species recorded from our house in Cumbria since Thursday.
House martin, wren, robin, chaffinch, goldcrest, willow warbler, nuthatch, wood pigeon, jackdaw, blue tit, great tit, siskin, wagtail, blackbird, osprey, buzzard, tawny owl, greylag goose, pheasant, chiffchaff.
Here's Crummock Water
The Guardian have a write up of some of the amazing work done by my Criminology colleagues, Camilla & Steph, on a national survey on police uniforms.
It’s been a massive project.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...
youtu.be/TjDEsGZLbio?... the funniest song of the genius Tom Lehrer
A very cool technology that allows students to interact with John Maynard Keynes’ ideas as he develops them is called a book
The Warwick 'rebrand' crystallises much of what is wrong with UK higher education today: namely (with honourable exceptions, of course) a fundamental disconnect between senior leaders and the reality of running academic departments and delivering teaching and research 'on the ground'.
They may have walled it, but the embarrassing screenshots will live on forever…
@samuelmoyn.bsky.social In 'Rights in the Liberal Tradition', Shklar says some interesting things about the links between romanticism and Mill's liberalism of personal development. It was overlooked and only published digitally in 2023 (journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...)
Not the Vogue article 😩 don’t try to make higher ed a (bad) luxury brand… I guess that explains SOME things. Warwick, just love yourself for who you are or no one else will. You were good enough 💜😳
Thought provoking piece from my good friend Sanjit here
I’m seeing a lot of this
