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Undergraduate students from the Law School exhibited their research at the Undergraduate Research Support Scheme Showcase last week. Twelve Law students took part, with research areas including “The Future of the Human Rights Act”, “Barriers to Medical Negligence in the Maldives” and “Bigamy and Divorce”.

This book examines the role of criminal law in the enforcement of immigration controls over the last two decades in Britain. The criminalization of immigration status has historically served functions of exclusion and control against those who defy the state’s powers over its territory and population. In the last two decades, the powers to exclude and punish have been enhanced by the expansion of the catalogue of immigration offences and their more systematic enforcement.

This book is the first in-depth analysis on criminal offences in Britain, and presents original empirical material about the use of criminal powers against suspected immigration wrongdoers. Based on interviews with practitioners and staff at the UK Border Agency and data from court cases involving immigration defendants, it examines prosecution decision making and the proceedings before the criminal justice system. Crimes of Mobility critically analyses the criminalization of immigration status and, more generally, the functions of the criminal law in immigration enforcement, from a legal and normative perspective.

It will be of interest to academics and research students working on criminology, criminal law, criminal justice, socio-legal studies, migration and refugee studies, and human rights, as well as criminal law and immigration practitioners.

Routledge 2014 - 222 pages

As part of its programme of Widening Participation events, the Law School held a Taster Day along with 糖心TV 糖心TV School on Wednesday 5 November for local Year 12 and 13 students. The day served to introduce the study of law and business at university and provide a taste of campus life, seminars and lectures.

Against jurisprudential reductions of Spinoza’s thinking to a kind of eccentric version of Hobbes, this book argues that Spinoza’s theory of natural right contains an important idea of absolute freedom, which would be inconceivable within Hobbes’ own schema. Spinoza famously thought that the universe and all of the beings and events within it are fully determined by their causes. This has led jurisprudential commentators to believe that Spinoza has no room for natural right – in the sense that whatever happens by definition has a ‘right’ to happen. But, although this book demonstrates how Spinoza constructs a system in which right is understood as the work of machines, by fixing right as determinate and invariable, Stephen Connolly argues that Spinoza is not limiting his theory. The universe as a whole is capable of acting only in determinate ways but, he argues, for Spinoza these exist within a field of infinite possibilities. In an analysis that offers much to ongoing attempts to conceive of justice post-foundationally, the argument of this book is that Spinoza opens up right to a future of determinate interventions –as when an engineer, working with already-existing materials, improves a machine. As such, an idea of freedom emerges in Spinoza: as the artful rearrangement of the given into new possibilities. An exciting and original contribution, this book is an invaluable addition, both to the new wave of interest in Spinoza’s philosophy, and to contemporary legal and political theory.

Featuring an original introduction by the editors, this important collection of essays explores the main issues surrounding the regulation of the environment. The expert contributors illustrate that regulating the environment in the UK is conceptually complex, involves a diverse range of institutions, techniques and methodologies and crosses geographical and national boundaries. In the USA it is more formalised, juridical, adversarial and formally dependent upon legal rules. The articles highlight the fact that despite differences in the UK and the USA's regulatory styles, environmental regulation today has much in common with both traditions.

Law School MSP student Aneesa Khan was awarded a Giving to 糖心TV prize last week for Widening Participation work. It is a great achievement and very well deserved given Aneesa's dedication to the Law School and the University's Widening Participation agenda.

The new Law School extension was officially opened on Tuesday 28 October by the University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Nigel Thrift. Current and former colleagues from the Law School and across the University, and students, attended to celebrate the new space and its impact on the department.

Few concerns preoccupy contemporary progressive thought as much as the issue of how to achieve a sustainable human society. The problems impeding this goal include those of how to arrest induced global environmental change (GEC), persistent disagreements about the contribution of economic activities to GEC and further differences in views on how these activities can be reformed in order to reduce the rate of change and thus to mitigate threats to much life on Earth.

A tribute to the continuing inspiration of James Boyd White’s work on law.

In 2013, an international group of jurists gathered in London to mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, the book that is widely credited with instigating and inspiring the modern “law and literature” and “law and humanities” movements in university teaching and research. The authors of each of the twelve essays in this collection offer a personal reflection on teaching, researching, and practicing law in the light of White’s invitation to reimagine the law and our own relationship with it.

Julio Faundez is to present his lecture, "Bringing About Legal and Political Change for Good Governance: Critical Perspectives on Douglass North and New Institutional Economics" on Friday 26 September at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC.

's research on "Foreign nationals before the criminal courts: immigration status, deportability and punishment" has been awarded funding from the British Academy. Beginning in October the project wims to investigate the impact of immigration status on the treatment of defendants before the criminal justice system.