糖心TV

Dr. Ming-Sung Kuo will present a paper entitled ‘Beyond Constitutionalism: Thinking Hard about Multilevel Constitutional Ordering in the Shadow of the State of Emergency’ at the ‘Legal Theory and Legitimacy beyond the State: What’s Law Got to Do with It?’ panel on the (International Society of Public Law) conference in Humboldt University (Berlin), Germany on 17-18 June, 2016. To find out more

Dr. Ming-Sung Kuo will present a paper entitled ‘Between Trailblazer and Trend-Follower: Political Rights and the Taiwan Constitutional Court’s Role in Democratic Transition’ at the ‘Bills of Rights and Regional Institutions: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on European and East Asian Cases’ International Workshop in University of Tuebingen, Germany on 16-17 June, 2016. To find out more

Focusing on the testamentary motif in Shakespeare’s plays, Gary Watt demonstrates how the shared rhetorical arts of law and theatre employ movement, materials and the affective properties of words to perform will on the social and playhouse stage.

Shakespeare was born into a new age of will, in which individual intent had the potential to overcome dynastic expectation. The 1540 Statute of Wills had liberated testamentary disposition of land and thus marked a turning point from hierarchical feudal tradition to horizontal free trade. Focusing on Shakespeare’s late Elizabethan plays, Gary Watt demonstrates Shakespeare’s appreciation of testamentary tensions and his ability to exploit the inherent drama of performing will.

Drawing on years of experience delivering rhetoric workshops for the Royal Shakespeare Company and as a prize-winning teacher of law, Gary Watt shows that Shakespeare is playful with legal technicality rather than obedient to it. The author demonstrates how Shakespeare transformed lawyers’ manual book rhetoric into powerful drama through a stirring combination of word, metre, movement and physical stage material, producing a mode of performance that was truly testamentary in its power to engage the witnessing public.

Published on the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s last will and testament, this is a major contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of law and humanities.

Table of Contents

1. ‘Performance is a kind of will or testament’; 2. Handling Tradition: Testament as Trade in Richard II and King John; 3. Worlds of Will in As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice; 4. ‘Shall I descend?’: Rhetorical Stasis and Moving Will in Julius Caesar; 5. ‘His will is not his own’: Hamlet Downcast and the Problem of Performance’; 6. Dust to Dust and Sealing Wax: The Materials of Testamentary Performance

With 'Super Thursday' behind us, the countdown to the referendum of 23^rd June is gaining pace.

In the first of a series of short articles on Europe, Lacuna considers some of the history and record of peace in the EU in . Supporters of the ‘remain’ campaign point to the attainment of peace in Europe as one if its highest ranking achievements. Indeed, war between member states seems unthinkable today. [republished in New Statesman ]

Turning away from Europe, in photojournalist Ana Palacios gives us a glimpse of the human cost of neglecting this tropical skin disease.

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Professor Shaheen Ali gave a lecture entitled Women's Rights and Plural Legalities as part of the 2016 Contextual Lecture Series:

In this talk Shaheen Sardar Ali contextualises the rights and place of British Muslim women negotiating their multiple identities. Some of the questions and issues addressed included the following: Is there an hierarchy of rights and legal norms that inform how British Muslim women order their lives and dealings with the plural legalities affecting their lives? To what extent do these plural legal systems contradict or reinforce each other and how does this interplay impact on the lives of British Muslim women?

The lecture was chaired by Dr Kenneth Wolfe, Convenor of the lecture series at Dulwich College, London.

" 'The death of one man is a tragedy,' Josef Stalin is said to have mused. 'The deaths of a million is a statistic.' A.T. Williams's prize winning debut, A Very British Killing, was a passionately written investigation into the death of a single man – Baha Mousa, an innocent Iraqi hotel receptionist killed by British soldiers in Basra in 2003. This, his second book, is a study in myriad deaths – the Nazi perpetration of genocide – and a prolonged meditation on Stalin's idea that the human mind cannot comprehend mass murder... His theme is the imperfect efforts made by the Allied military authorities... to bring the criminals responsible for these horrors to justice." (Daily Telegraph)

"This is a fine book that does a great job of debunking one of the most enduring myths in history." (History of War)

"Splendid book... Much more than a historical narrative and assessment… This is a superb book which offers no easy answers but invites the reader to join its author on a grim odyssey." (History Today)

"Earnest, unsettling book... Williams is a thoughtful, lucid writer, with a lawyer’s appetite for detail... A Passing Fury is heartfelt, moving and often powerfully written." (Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times)

"Haunting, sensitive and thoughtful study." (Nigel Jones, Daily Telegraph)

"Williams has put together an original polemic against our assumptions about these trials, including those at Nuremberg. (David Herman, New Statesman)

"... gripping and original ..." (The Catholic Herald)

"... skilfully reveals a chaotic world in which war crimes investigation teams... were left to do their best in extremely trying circumstances." (Scotland on Sunday)

Jackie Hodgson and Laurène Soubise have a new forthcoming publication in , on 'Understanding the Sentencing Process in France'.

French sentencing is characterized by broad judicial discretion and an ethos of individualized justice that is adapted to the rehabilitation of the offender. The current approach aims to prevent recidivism through rehabilitation and so protect the interests of society as well as reintegrating the offender as reformed citizen. In opposition to this approach is that of the political right, characterized by the recent Sarkozy regime, which favors deterrence through harsher penalties, minimum prison sentences and increased incarceration, including after the sentence has been served in the case of offenders considered dangerous. This article looks at the practice as well as the theory of French sentencing and locates the sentencing process (for it is a process, not a single event) within the broader context of French inquisitorially rooted criminal procedure. It argues that the central part played by the prosecutor in criminal cases (including in case disposition through alternative sanctions), her role in recommending a sentence to the court and the court’s invariable decision to follow this suggestion, together with the unitary mature of the French judicial profession, means that despite the broad discretion afforded the sentencing judge, there is a remarkable degree of consistency in the penalties imposed. It examines the range of penalties available and considers the most recent addition put forward by the Consensus Commission and legislated in 2014, the contrainte pénale, suggesting that this is unlikely to have a great impact without the investment of resources in the probation service and a change in the judicial culture which still favors simple sentencing options, including imprisonment, to the array of alternative options now in place.

As part of an on-going collaboration, Henrique and Anastasia have recently published a paper titled ‘Punishment, Justice and Emotions’ for the Oxford Handbooks Online in Criminology and Criminal Justice. The article can be accessed on-line on  or, alternatively, a PDF of the last approved version can be found at Wrap (). This paper outlines the relationship between emotions and criminal justice and argues that, although punishment has been justified as a rational response to the problem of crime, there are emotional dimensions to its practice and function that relate to broader aspects of social experience.

At the April Soroptomists dinner meeting, SI Kenilworth welcomed several guests who joined them for a membership event. The highlight of the evening was a talk by Professor Shaheen Ali, from the Law department of 糖心TV University, who gave us a fascinating talk on Women’s Rights. To find out more

On Saturday 23rd April, the Law School's Widening Participation team hosted the prize giving event of the inaugural . Since November, we have been working with 25 pupils from non-traditional backgrounds from eight schools in Coventry and 糖心TVshire through a series of Saturday workshops in order to improve their research skills and write a 2,500 word essay on the theme of social justice.

To celebrate the launch of our new LLM in International Commercial Law (starting in 2017), international fees have now been held at the 2016/17 level for ALL our LLM programmes in 2017/18.

Paul Raffield was invited by the British Council to give two “Knowledge is GREAT” lectures in Singapore and Malaysia, as part of “”, a global programme organised by the British Council to celebrate the life and work of William Shakespeare on the 400th anniversary of his death. To view the presentation/podcast