This thesis explores the potential of volunteer-based mentoring of offenders and victims in criminal justice in England and Wales. The research was based on four case-study organisations and involved analysis of the recruitment and training of volunteers and of their contribution in comparison with standards defined for mentoring as practiced in more generic professional mentoring circles. Key findings from the research were of limited appreciation of the nature of mentoring among the four organisations; of significant reliance on college students as volunteers seeking work experience for their CVs (and who therefore were not always available to provide longer-term mentoring support); of rudimentary training programmes; and of supervisory staff who often seemed reluctant to empower volunteers to engage in proper mentoring roles. Indeed, rather than mentoring, the contribution of the volunteers was better described as a mix of practical assistance provision, coaching and clerical/administrative support. Despite this, the main conclusion of this research was that volunteer-based mentoring does appear to offer valuable potential in criminal justice for both offenders and victims of crime. However, more strategic approaches to recruitment and more rigorous training in the principles and skills of mentoring are needed, as well as greater support from supervising staff.

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Judicial discretion is at the heart of a humane criminal justice system, but the latitude exercisable in the UK juvenile courts allowed constructive treatment at one end of the spectrum and penal custody the other. Official acknowledgement of the different culpability of adult and juvenile offenders really began in the middle of the 19th century, and Parliament finally made provision early in the 20th century for this ‘welfare principle’, that reform and welfare rather than punishment were to guide judicial discretion in the decisions and conduct of juvenile criminal courts. This thesis offers an explanation for the varying emphasis given to this principle in England/Wales and Scotland, concentrating on the last 40 years of the 20th century. The lack of implementation of earlier reforms was confronted in two major reports, chaired by Kilbrandon in Scotland and Longford in England and Wales. Although they came to similar conclusions about the causes and the remedies for juvenile delinquency, and their subsequent legislation shared the same general philosophy, the implementation took diametrically different routes in the two jurisdictions. It is argued that deep-seated cultural and historical differences played a significant role both in legislative reforms and their application, coupled in Scotland with a conjunction of agency and political pragmatism that produced radical reforms. Significant factors implicated in the failure of the English reforms were political ambivalence towards the legislation; judicial/magisterial resistance or lack of training, particularly on child development; the absence of accountability in the magistracy; and the influence exercised by the Magistrates' Association. The research draws on archival papers and research literature, supplemented by interviews with key people. It has sought to find the origin of some influential ideas and explain their acceptance or rejection by the lay justices, through their exercise of judicial discretion. As there were further Acts related to juvenile defendants in both jurisdictions in the 1990s, the research was concluded with a consideration of their implementation.

The study will examine the introduction of the computerisation of crime and intelligence recording in three police forces in the United Kingdom in the decade 1976-1986. The thesis will critique the roles and actions of the main players in this decade, The Home Office in London England, three provincial police forces, Kent County Constabulary, Humberside Police and Lothian and Borders Police, and the computer supply industry. The study will consider the concept of ‘crime' from a jurisprudential viewpoint and will consider the legal imposition on chief officers of police to collect, store and distribute certain crime based data. The study will also examine and analyse in detail three computer projects in different police forces. The use of new, complex and expensive computer programs is highlighted with the introduction of free text searching of large data sources and the need for large scale mainframe computers to handle the analysis and storage of that data. The limited success of two police projects will question the requirement for central government control of publicly funded new technology. The study will examine strategic planning in the process, as well as the rush to be the first police force to embrace the new technology. Further the study will review central government control over public spending, in the first police force based computerisation projects. In conclusion, the thesis will suggest that new police systems should be scaled to local needs and guided by expert central advice. Additionally, chief police officers should be encouraged to use new technology in a strategic manner, sharing outcomes in open fora. Possible new research problems are listed and evaluated.

Police around the world present evidence to suspects at different points during the interview. Some psychologists suggest that police should strategically delay disclosing evidence and test the truthfulness of a suspect’s account by comparing it with the evidence. Moreover, psychologists suggest interviewers who plan strategic evidence disclosure might be less guilt-presumptive about the suspect because they must consider alternative explanations of the evidence as part of their planning. In contrast, many lawyers argue that police should not strategically disclose evidence as it undermines a suspect’s fair trial rights and prevents lawyers from advising suspects effectively before the interview. To address these conflicting perspectives from the domains of psychology and law, this thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach and considers strategic evidence disclosure within the broader legal context of a suspect’s custodial detention. First, a field study of police disclosure briefings with lawyers, lawyer-client consultations, and police interviews, and a survey of lawyers highlights how lawyers rely upon the police’s evidence to advise suspects in custody. When police strategically disclose evidence, lawyers cannot provide informed legal advice and tend to advise suspects to not answer police questions. Second, three experiments and a mini meta-analysis show that generating alternative evidential explanations for criminal cases, as interviewers planning strategic evidence disclosure might do, has a very small effect, or plausibly no effect, on people’s beliefs about the suspect’s guilt. Finally, a mock crime experiment shows that, even two months after a crime, truthful suspects’ accounts fit evidence that was strategically withheld more than deceptive suspects’ accounts did. Independent laypeople from a follow-up experiment could distinguish between these truthful and deceptive accounts. Together, these findings suggest that strategic evidence disclosure could help deception detection even months after a crime, but it also impinges upon suspects’ legal rights and is unlikely to make interviewers less guilt-presumptive.

This dissertation builds on existing work by members of the ‘Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911’ project, led by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and E.A. Wrigley. It addresses three central problems of the project, namely (a) the lack of geographical and temporal coverage by the project’s existing data sources before the nineteenth century, (b) the allocation of the numerous men with the indistinct denominator of ‘labourer’ to occupational sectors, and (c) the correction of occupational structures derived from single-occupation denominators for the (presumed) ubiquity of dual employments in the early-modern world. The solutions to these problems result in a set of estimates for the male occupational structure of England and Wales between 1600 and 1850, in twenty-year time intervals, at the level of sectors (primary, secondary, tertiary) and sub-sectors (farmers, miners, textile workers, transport workers, etcetera), at national, regional, and local geographical scales. These estimates raise important questions regarding the validity of conclusions drawn in the highly influential national accounts literature. Firstly, they place the structural shift from agriculture to industry firmly in the seventeenth and, to a lesser degree, even the sixteenth century, well before the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, means that productivity growth in the secondary sector during the Industrial Revolution must have been much higher than previously thought, and thereby also the effects of technological and organisational innovation. Secondly, it provides strong evidence that although economic developments during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century may seem to have been limited and gradual at the national scale, this surface calm hides diverging regional developments which were anything but limited and gradual, held together by a persistently growing transport sector. The result was a regionally specialised yet integrated economy, firmly in place at the eve of the Industrial Revolution which – in light of the known role of small, specialised regions as incubators of technological innovation and novel forms of economic organisation in present-day economies – may well have contributed to Britain’s precocious transition to modern economic growth.

Chapter 1 introduces the topic of third party funding of litigation which is a recent phenomenon in academic circles. Few of the existing papers on commercial litigation funding are empirically based and those that are, with one exception, use surveys and interviews to collect data. Within the legal boundaries of litigation funding, economic theory predicts that in perfectly competitive markets consumers control what is supplied, prices cover costs without excessive profits and inefficient producers are eliminated. However reality rarely conforms to prediction, and regulation may be appropriate in the public interest to overcome market failures arising from information asymmetries. The research focus is: ‘How effectively are commercial third party litigation funders governed and/or regulated?’ Chapter 2 proceeds to consider the literature on regulation, it’s applicability to litigation funding and the interests of stakeholders. A major concern is the ability of a litigation funder to pay the costs of a winning defendant. The conclusion reached in Chapter 3 is that litigation funders have too much choice in the way they report and disclose information and what they actually report and disclose is deficient in meeting the needs of investors. In Chapter 4, using single firm event study methodology I discover that the stock exchange market does not always react as predicted to disclosure by litigation funders and consequently the market is not an adequate proxy for a regulator. Chapter 5 extends chapter 3 on the solvency issue and also considers other stakeholder issues e.g. ethical ones which may require regulation. The conclusion reached is that a light touch independent regulator overseen by the legal services board would be appropriate. This work narrows the literature gap for empirically based economic research and augments and extends the existing literature by examining third party funding of heterogeneous high value, low volume cases in contrast to homogenous, low value, high volume cases. It is the first work on the accounting regulation of litigation funding. This work will also assist investors, the judiciary and other stakeholders to better evaluate the risks of this new industry.

This socio-legal thesis explores the highly topical and underexplored issue of the legal regulation of gay and lesbian collaborative co-parenting in England & Wales, drawing on British Columbia (Canada) as a jurisdiction where this issue has been considered in more detail. These families involve reproductive collaborations between single or partnered lesbians and gay men where a child is conceived through assisted reproduction and each of the adults remain involved in the child’s life. Collaborative co-parenting can take a variety of forms, each of which is distinguishable from gamete donation or surrogacy because each of the adults continues to exercise some sort of parental role in relation to the child. Since the adoption of the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, it has been possible for two female parents to appear on a child’s birth certificate following birth and for two male parents to be registered following a court parental order. The UK parliament has not, however, gone so far as to allow more than two parents to be legally recognised. This contrasts with the approach in British Columbia, which allows three parents to be registered on the birth certificate in cases of same-sex parenting involving assisted reproduction. In both Canada and the UK, however, courts have struggled to balance the interests of those involved in these collaborative co-parenting arrangements with varying degrees of success. This thesis combines detailed, comparative doctrinal analysis with a series of case studies of collaborative co-parenting families gathered from in-depth interviews with co-parents and legal professionals in Canada and the UK. In doing this, a typology of collaborative co-parenting families is advanced. The conclusion the thesis draws from this is that gay and lesbian collaborative co-parents are not an homogenous group and the law’s adherence, in England & Wales, to a one-size-fits-all, dyadic approach to parenthood based on the intimate couple does not adequately reflect the needs of the adults in this situation nor what is in the best interests of the child. One of the key findings to emerge from this study and the typology of collaborative co-parenting it advances is that the legal framework in England & Wales risks overlooking the interests of gay men who are involved in collaborative co-parenting in its attempt to protect women-led homonuclear families, even where this is not consistent with their agreed role in the child’s life. Therefore, a central recommendation is that any reform to this area of law should move away from a prescribed dyadic parenting model as the basis for regulating parent-child relationships in collaborative co-parenting families. Instead, it should require a careful consideration of pre-conception intentions, recorded where possible in a parenting solidarity agreement.

The objective of this diploma thesis is to render a comprehensive analysis of licence contracts in two countries - the Czech Republic and England and Wales. The effort to highlight differences between the two scrutinized jurisdictions and related criticism are the most important methods applied in this work and, hopefully, the most recognizable benefits of it. The thesis consists of a short introduction, followed by four descriptive chapters and author's subjective conclusions. The introductory part presents methods of research used throughout the work and implicitly hints what can the reader except when studying this diploma thesis. The first chapter splits into two mutually linked subchapters. The first one defines the very term licence, its etymology and classification. The following subchapter describes general characteristics of intellectual property, a crucial topic to licence contracts and thus indirectly to this thesis. This thesis promises a comparison of two legal systems and the second chapter fulfils this aim. Consisting of two additionally divided subchapters, the author engages in an analysis of the copyright and patent law respectively. Both examined intellectual property rights are looked at via optics of Czech, British and European intellectual property law. After being...

The principle of equality in the workplace, enshrined in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, applies to a wide category of workers. However, there are certain exceptions to the legislation. Ministers of religion are not protected by the Act where employment is limited to one sex. Historically "employment" as a Church of England priest was limited to one sex. Then in 1993, following the momentous General Synod vote, legislation was passed which allowed women to be ordained as priests. A significant change had taken place regarding the theology of the Church. This shift in theology also brought the legal position of priests, in relation to sex discrimination, into question. An initial question was, should such priests be protected by secular employment legislation? if so, what are the legal difficulties of inclusion under the Sex Discrimination Act, and what are the practical difficulties of accommodation under the Act? These questions form the foundation stones of this thesis. A four stage process was used to answer these questions. First, a philosophical analysis of the theory behind sex discrimination law was undertaken, focusing on the concepts of equality and difference. Secondly, the position of the Church of England in relation to sex discrimination law was assessed with special reference to the employment status of ministers of religion. Thirdly, drawing on the theoretical work of stages one and two, an empirical investigation into the treatment of Church of England priests was conducted. The fourth stage built upon the empirical findings and the theoretical framework. British and European Community sex discrimination law was critically analysed, as was the relevant ecclesiastical law, and recommendations for law reform were made.