This thesis examines the sex industry as a whole with the intention of establishing that prostitution should not be marginalised but integrated within the criminal law and regulated as other Sexual Entertainment Venues. I first establish a framework of analysis needed to illuminate the constraints put upon the different elements of commercial sexual activities. This framework stems from the Sexual Offences Act (SOA) 2003, the primary statute that regulates all sexual activities, whether commercial or non-commercial. It has four elements: consent, nature, purpose and visibility. By means of ‘black letter’ law and case histories, I then explore three areas within the sex industry: pornography, live sexual entertainment and prostitution in order to show that the element of consent is consistent throughout and relies solely on the SOA 2003 and is linked directly to the nature of the sexual activities. The nature of the sexual activities has its basis in non-commercial sexual activities, but is regulated in the sex industry in such a way that the nature differs between each commercial area. By contrast, the purpose remains constant in commercial sexual activities although it is at odds with non-commercial. All aspects of consensual sexual activities, whether commercial or non-commercial, must not be visible for unintended viewers. However, advertising of commercial sex is possible and thus visible, with the exception of prostitution. With regards to prostitution, legislation criminalises prostitutes who advertise and their mere presence constitutes a form of advertising. The public presence of prostitutes as well as the presence of their clients also creates the grounds for public nuisance. I then suggest, based on the above information, that statutory legislation could include the use of brothels, this stems from the New Zealand model, in order to respond to issues raised about consent and visibility, as well as extend the protection offered to prostitutes to other sectors of the sex industry when they are confronted with the issue of consent.

ASEAN aimed to create a highly competitive, single market, production-based AEC in 2015 by applying strategic measures set out in the AEC Blueprint. However, after seven years of its adoption, the deadline has become merely the beginning of the AEC, not the finished line. Since November 2015, ASEAN has adopted the AEC Blueprint 2025 which aims to create a competitive, innovative, and dynamic AEC by 2025. One of the measures ASEAN uses is ensuring effective competition policy through greater harmonisation and convergence of national competition law. The key concept of this thesis is competitiveness. It applies Professor Michael E Porter’s concept of competitive advantage and gathers 15 years of data on the ASEAN Member States’ competitiveness. And it questions whether competition law and policy attribute to a nation’s competitiveness. If yes, to what extent. Then it questions whether it is necessary for ASEAN to take a supranational approach to become a competitive region because ASEAN has its own norm of cooperation, the ASEAN way, which is ingrained in ASEAN since its establishment. And it is now formally recognised in the ASEAN Charter. The results show that competition law and policy is not a sole key determinant of competitiveness. Having a low degree of market concentration, effective competition law and policy, and efficient goods market does not necessarily correlate to high competitiveness. A country’s competitiveness is affected by its stage of development too. Additionally, the political economy of a country has a certain degree of effect on efficiency in competition law enforcement. However, the determinant factor of efficient competition law enforcement lies on political will rather than type of the government administration as in the case of Taiwan and South Korea. The disparities in the economic development of AMSs are obvious. Therefore, trying to harmonise AMSs’ competition law and policy using an all-sector approach is not recommended and proved difficult, if not impossible. Moreover, a supranational approach is not compatible with the ASEAN way. Hence, a sectoral approach is more likely to help ASEAN achieve its goal. ASEAN has already begun its own sectoral approach to competitiveness in the aviation market. The Aviation Agreements which the AMSs have signed between them provide much more details and commitments on competition rules concerning this industry than in the Regional Guidelines 2010. The application of sectoral approach alongside with the comprehensive approach to competition law and policy to enhance competitiveness of the relevant market is practiced in many countries. Examples of how regulatory body in electricity in the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea collaborate with their competition agencies provide evidence that it is possible and efficient. Therefore, ASEAN does not need a supranational approach to improve its competitiveness regarding competition law and policy. This thesis suggests that ASEAN should pursue a sectoral approach in dealing with competition issues among member state the ASEAN way.

The focus of this study is on the concept and contours of NIAC under IHL. Its purpose is to provide further clarity to the process of identifying NIACs under international law. At its most basic, conflict identification is the real-time objective assessment of prevailing factual circumstances in order to determine the applicable legal regime(s). It is thus an exercise in the classification of armed violence providing a detailed critical examination of the material concept of NIAC, including its threshold of activation and corresponding personal, geographical and temporal scope of applicability under IHL.

The problems which exist for a discussion about the relationship between the so-called mentally-disordered offender or accused and the notion of criminal responsibility and punishment are complex. They can not be fully understood without a consideration of the definition of crime, criminal responsibility, and of theories of punishment. Problems are not simply confined to a theoretical level. Accordingly, there is a need to understand the reality of mental disorder as perceived by psychiatrists and lawyers. This thesis, in chapter 1, looks at the concept of crime and attempts to establish a comprehensive definition. This may specify the circumstances in which the mentally disordered person is likely to become involved with the state and thereby be subject to a particular or special relationship with the law. Accordingly, chapter 1 explores the concepts of crime, its elements, and its limitations. Chapter 2 considers the various theories of punishment in order to seek to establish whether there are sufficient reasons to justify the way we deal with mentally disordered persons and whether they are rooted in concepts of fairness and justice. The next chapter explores the notion of mental disorder and examines the medical basis for understanding the condition. It attempts to examine whether the condition is "medical" and indeed whether it is an "illness". The relationship between the medical model and the legal model of mental disorder is studied in addition to the role played by psychiatrists. Chapter 4 examines the lawyer's approach to the mentally disordered person and seeks to determine whether the legal definition of insanity is in any way different from the medical concept of mental disorder and the consequences that flow from the various defences of insanity. Chapter 5 looks at the reality of the interaction between the mentally disordered person and the various institutions with which he comes into contact. Thus, state hospitals, the disposal of mentally disordered offenders or accused persons and the various sentences or restriction orders are examined. The final chapter considers possible areas for reform, and makes certain recommendations, which if implemented might serve to remove some of the difficulties that have been identified. he investigation includes the situation with regard to mental disorder and criminal responsibility in Iraqi criminal law as wel1. The main purpose of this thesis is to find out the appropriate theory of punishment which might be used to resolve the problem with mentally disordered people (both responsible and non-responsible) in respect of the sentencing process in U.K.

This thesis examines the current Brazilian oil sector's institutional and regulatory governance structure and its impact on four variables: investment, production, technology-innovation and the strategic control of oil. These variables are fundamental for the development of the oil industry and they are mentioned in Brazilian laws as central aspects to be continually developed. A prospective analysis of the 2010 reform in the Brazilian oil regulatory framework is a major part of the thesis because the alterations are relatively recent and have not as yet produced a set of consistent and statistically significant data. The research adopts a multidisciplinary perspective, using the institutional, reflexive and responsive theoretical frameworks and a methodology based on the examination of the legislation, semi-structured interviews and a historical comparative study of international regulatory governance in the oil sector to draw two main conclusions. First, the new Brazilian regulatory framework will have significant drawbacks in three of the four variables: investments, production and technology-innovation, essentially because of its excessively interfering and rigid approach, based on command and control regulations. Second, despite allowing an increasing strategic control over oil in some specific situations, this goal could have been attained in a manner that would have avoided the shortcomings in the other variables. Based on this understanding, the thesis makes recommendations to overcome the identified drawbacks. In line with the responsive and reflexive conceptual frameworks, the proposals consider that regulations in a dynamic and changeable sector as the oil industry should avert intrusiveness and imperative commands. They should rather advocate a versatile and interactive regulatory approach, steering and guiding the different stakeholders to socially desirable outcomes.

This thesis is concerned with the legal theory behind environmental rights. There are a number of different approaches that deploy rights as a mechanism to bring about environmental protection within international law, all of which can be termed ‘environmental rights’. These include a human right to a healthy environment and procedural environmental rights. But there are also theories that support a more innovative or extensive use of legal rights for protecting the natural world. Notably, many of these theories concern the introduction of nonhuman rights (animal rights or rights of nature). This thesis investigates the theory behind and the practical structure of these various approaches, as well as analysing the very concept of ‘rights’. The original contribution to knowledge is threefold. I present a case for a human right to a healthy environment to be defined broadly: measured according to human and ecosystem health, and conceived as a right of both individuals and peoples; I rigorously apply both Interest Theory and Hohfeld’s analysis of rights to human rights and thus construct a clear model for the structure of the sort of rights found in human rights (termed ‘vital rights’); and I extend the philosophical theory behind human rights (and in particular the concept of dignity) towards the growing field of rights of nature. Considered holistically, the thesis presents and suggests modes of thinking that seek to soften the divide between humanity and nature. This is done through a consideration of lived experience as always already ecologically embedded. As a result, the subject of vital rights (human rights included) should be understood as ecologically embedded living beings, opening the door to both nonhuman rights and new fields for human rights.

This study examines the criminal liability that may be incurred by participants in contact sports for violence that results in injury to a fellow participant. For these purposes, I concentrate on boxing, rugby and soccer; sports that involve a level of physicality that risks, and regularly causes, injury. The violence that is intrinsic to their practice is in some senses archetypically criminal, and yet, that self-same violence is also constitutive of sports that are perceived to have enormous personal, social and cultural value, and which have been declared by the House of Lords to amount to ‘lawful activities’. A formal account of the criminal law of sports violence posits the consent of the participants as the primary determinant of the imposition of liability for acts of violence committed during the course of contact sports. In this thesis, I examine this formal account and propose that the substance of the lawfulness of sports violence needs to be understood in terms of its socio-historical development, and the sophisticated rule-systems and pluralistic regulatory backdrop against which modern sports operate. This thesis contributes a new understanding of the offences that pertain to sports violence, and the normative role and doctrinal function of the participants’ consent, in order to understand the way in which the criminal law accommodates violent sports practices. The thesis also suggests new ideas in relation to the ‘playing culture’ of sport and its relationship to the criminal law, and the role of prosecutorial discretion in effectively shaping the lawfulness of ‘legitimate sport’.

This thesis explores social workers’ practice and understanding of support for the exercise of legal capacity in adult safeguarding. The impetus for this study was the ‘revolution’ of article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which questioned fundamental and long-held legal positions on the rights of people with mental impairments to make decisions about their lives. This shift is a fundamental one, but there is very little existing empirical evidence of how such a revolutionary change in legal frameworks might actually work in practice, and what the challenges may be. Thus, this thesis aimed to empirically examine existing practice, to explore what the baseline of understanding was, and the difficulties that social workers encountered in using support mechanisms. An ethnographic approach was taken, with participant observation of an adult safeguarding team over a 17 week period, followed by interviews with 7 of the social workers who had been closely observed. The importance of this study is that the focus of the debate on article 12 has been on restoring legal capacity to individuals who had previously been denied it on the basis of their lack of mental capacity. While this is important, and is discussed in this thesis, the empirical work that forms the basis of this study demonstrates that denial of legal capacity affects a much wider group. In this context, ‘support’ may be less about supporting decisions in the particular instance, but rather supporting the individual to effect the decision that they have made, or to continue to be able to make decisions in the future. Using a theoretical framework of relational autonomy and universal vulnerability, the analysis shows that social workers the individual framing of mental capacity in the law means that they struggle accommodate the possibility of support for that mental capacity from a third party. Adults who have mental capacity but are considered ‘vulnerable’ are also significantly disempowered in the safeguarding framework. The social workers see the concept of mental capacity as overly limiting, and that vulnerable adults who are not captured by the Mental Capacity Act 2005 may still lack what this thesis terms ‘relational capacity’. A link made between vulnerability and a lack of relational capacity results in individuals being disempowered, kept as ‘objects to be organised’, rather than agentive subjects. The conclusion of this thesis is that the potential for undue influence in the exercise of support under article 12 is very possible. The data shows that we must consider carefully how we respond to this, building a universally enabling environment, rather than one which reduces agency and legal capacity.

This thesis critically examines the claim that ‘family’ is at the heart of the contemporary inquest system, analysing the impact of this putative change on the construction of kinship, death and the legal. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it engages with socio-legal and cultural analyses of death; family and kinship scholarship; and critical legal scholarship on death and the state. In doing so it reveals the richness of the inquest as an area of law which has hitherto attracted relatively little attention but which merits extended exploration. Drawing on historical and jurisprudential materials in the first section, it provides an analysis of the changing historical form of the inquest, and argues that legislative and judicial reconfiguration of the inquest process since 2003 has fundamentally changed the nature of the system, most importantly in relation to the engagement of family prior to a final hearing. It argues that this engagement of the family affects the jurisdiction and form of an individual inquest, and developing this analysis, it explores a series of interviews undertaken with Coroners and officers in England. This empirical work deepens the earlier analysis, drawing insights from reflections on a set of vignettes which trouble the edges of ideas of family; emphasising the ways in which images of family and kinship are conceptualised and materialised through the unfolding of an individual inquest. The central argument is that ‘family’ is a negotiated and constitutive feature of the inquest system; charged with overseeing dignity in a bureaucratic process, making substantive and transparent that which may be otherwise impenetrable and formal, and simultaneously determining the edges of the private and intimate. The thesis contends that an emphasis on meaningful connections to the deceased leads to a fluid construction of kinship, and a reimagination of the politics of both death and family. It argues that the inquest system, without narratives of kinship and connection, risks existing in a solely technocratic form in which ‘disinterested decision-makers using objective, rationalist and universalised forms of knowledge justify decisions that are communicated in an expert language’ (Morgan 2006, 246), and the family bring a ‘tacit expertise that underpins shared experiences, values, symbols, identities and understandings, [providing] the tenor or texture of debate [that] transmits and generates a community because of its capacity to defy routinisation and the explicit codes of expert knowledge’ (Morgan 2006, 259). Working through the inquest process and unpicking these contrasting forms of expertise, this thesis reveals the way in which an individual inquest is constructed through an endeavour to combine contrasting tensions; to blend a contingent, contextual, participative and meaningful process with the ceremony of a mini state funeral (Davis et al 2002), the collection of statistical information, and the setting of standards to prevent future deaths.

On the 29th of June 2007, the representatives of the Government of Uganda (GoU) and the representatives of the Lord's Resistance Army/Movement rebels (LRA/M) signed an Agreement on Reconciliation and Accountability (AAR). The AAR provided for the use of both International Criminal Law (ICL) and Traditional Justice Mechanisms (TJMs) as part of the framework on accountability and reconciliation due to the conflict in Northern Uganda. Since warrants of arrest had already been issued against the top leaders of the LRA/M prior to the signing of this AAR, a rift arose between those who supported the ICC and those who supported the AAR. The former group argued that the AAR was promoting impunity while the latter group viewed the AAR as a vehicle for a sustainable post conflict transition. This project argues that a critical legal pluralist interpretive framework (CLP) for implementing Agenda Item III of the Juba peace accord is more responsive to the complexities of Uganda's history and politics than the interpretive frameworks of mainstream international criminal law (ICL) or traditional legal pluralism (TLP). In adopting a CLP interpretive framework, critics of the AAR will be able to see that the AAR is not promoting impunity.