Vulnerable and/or intimidated court users are able to give evidence with the assistance of special measures. This thesis examines the role of equality in the provision of such measures to those giving evidence in Crown Court trials. I adopt Keith Hawkins’ conceptual framework of surround, field and frames to analyse the multitude of factors relevant to understanding its role. The standard of equality I invoke is that which underpinned the initial development of special measures for non-defendant witnesses. This is used to assess whether the law remains committed to equal treatment despite the unequal provision of special measures between vulnerable and/or intimidated defendant and non-defendant witnesses. Furthermore, using findings from interviews undertaken with 18 criminal practitioners, I consider the role that the principle of equality appears to play in the use of special measures. I conclude that the principle of equality is not consistently upheld in the provision of special measures in law and practice. Barriers to its more prominent role include the way, and the socio-political context in which, special measures law developed; the legal field in which they are invoked; and the way that criminal practitioners appear to frame decisions about their use.

This thesis critically appraises the exceptions to the principle of autonomy in documentary credits. In appraising the exceptions, the central theme pursued is to address the question whether the application of the exceptions to the principle of autonomy is satisfactory. In addressing this general question, the study pays special attention to English law on documentary credits. However, the thesis also looks at the comparable position in other common law jurisdictions, such as United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Recently, in the different jurisdictions, opinion has not been consistent on what constitutes exceptions to the principle of autonomy in letters of credit. Apart from the traditional exception of fraud, recent English decisions to some extent have recognised illegality and express contractual restrictions on a beneficiary’s right to draw on a credit as compelling grounds on which the autonomy doctrine would be ignored. In other jurisdictions, other exceptions such as nullity and unconscionability have emerged. This dissertation assesses all these exceptions to the principle of autonomy with the aim of answering the question whether these exceptions facilitate documentary credits’ practice or as argued in some quarters, undermine the assurance of payment promised the seller/beneficiary.

Since the mid 1980s, a mass of scholarly material has been published on sex offender treatment, particularly relating to cognitive behavioural techniques. Alongside this, there has been a gradual recognition by academics and practitioners in the field of the particular challenges faced by those providing treatment for sexual offenders. As well as having to analyse detailed accounts of sexual violence, sex offender therapists are faced with the responsibility of working with some of the most difficult offenders in the system in terms of their generally poor motivation to change and the serious consequences of their reoffending. As a result, various detrimental impacts have been associated with providing treatment to sexual offenders, including stress, burnout and vicarious traumatisation. This thesis presents the results of interviews conducted with a variety of Prison Service staff working with sex offenders on the Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP), which has been hailed as the ‘largest multi-site, cognitive behavioural treatment programme for sex offenders in the world’. Participants were asked about the positive and negative effects of working with sexual offenders, the quality of training they had received, and what types of personal and organisational support were available to them. The results show that the Prison Service needs to give greater consideration when selecting candidates to deliver the SOTP, and those individuals who have been a victim of sexual abuse should be excluded from the recruitment process. In addition, it is concluded that there should be further staff training for those working on the SOTP, and that existing sources of organisational support need to be improved.

This thesis addresses the "air of paradox" that continues to plague Kant's absolute prohibition of revolution. In seeking to identify the source of this contention, I investigate a possible inconsistency within Kant's Doctrine of Right as a doctrine of external freedom. Taking my lead from Christine Korsgaard's idea of ―perverted justice‖, I explore the idea that states can exist that undermine their own purpose, in their denial of the freedom which is their end. Establishing the possibility of perverted justice takes us into an inquiry into the nature of Kant's moral theory as a theory of freedom, and specifically, the particular kind of freedom that Right takes as its end. I take the contrast between the ethical and juridical domains as my point of departure, defending Kant's strict division between the two domains. In doing so I defend the moral status of Right against commentators who exclude it on grounds of its external nature, arguing for a conception of practical freedom that is broader than the internal freedom of autonomy, and hence can include Right under its scope. From this I offer an account of external freedom as acting in accordance with the Universal Principle of Right, which is nothing more than the constraint of one's choice under universal law. In conclusion, I argue that Right (justice) cannot be frustrated in the way that Korsgaard's idea of perverted justice suggests, due to the formal nature of external freedom. Obedience to positive law cannot deny external freedom in the way she suggests; rather, our constraint under law is constitutive of our freedom as the end of political society. There is therefore no inconsistency to be found within Kant's Doctrine of Right between the idea of external freedom as the end of Right and his absolute prohibition of revolution.

This thesis consists of a study of English and US corporate finance law and, in particular, the law in relation to hybrid financial instruments. I consider hybrids any financial instrument that presents a mix of equity and debt characteristics. Therefore this thesis excludes from examination all the derivative instruments, while it focuses on two main types of hybrid security, in relation to their relevance to the situation studied: preference shares and convertible bonds. Despite a clear distinction in law between equity and debt, the development of sophisticated hybrid financial instruments has forced regulators to look beyond the legal form of an instrument to its practical substance. As observable in practice, the increase in financial innovation reflects the necessity of the parties to allocate control and cash-flow rights in a way that diverges from the classic allocation resulting from equity and debt. Most of the empirical and theoretical research in this area has focused on the tax advantages of issuing hybrids as a way of reducing the cost of capital or on their capacity to be subordinated to all the creditors and to be unable to trigger the liquidation of the firm in case of default on its payouts. However, very little contribution has been made to the analysis of these securities with regard to their implications for corporate governance. This thesis aims to discuss the rationale for issuing hybrids, and to evaluate the law relative to these instruments against the background of both agency costs and property rights theories. The functional approach unveils an important rationale for issuing hybrids. The UK and US have legal systems characterised by transactional flexibility. They rely heavily on ex post standards strategies to protect preference shareholders and on the judiciary to evaluate the fairness of a transaction. This flexibility places the UK and US legal systems among the most business-friendly countries. The vacuum left by mandatory company law in favour of a major flexibility in the market has pushed the parties to fill it contracting for their rights. In so doing they have facilitated the business relations and better protected themselves with careful drafting.

This thesis investigates in depth the phenomenon of biobanking from an anthropological and socio-legal approach. In recent years there has been an evertighter alliance formed between discoveries in life sciences and capital accumulation. The rapid advances in genomics introduce a new form of capital in the development of technoscience. In order to find biomarkers for genetic association studies in the susceptibility of common complex diseases, the generation of large-scale population resources is deemed to be an important step to support the development of genomics which now transforms its imagery from informatics to therapeutics. Biobanks - collections of human biological materials linked through genetic information - have attracted considerable attention across the globe. These global assemblages of capital and vital politics have led to innovative institutions and arrangements in fields of technoscience and ethics. Though biobanking is an apparently global phenomenon, diverse political innovations and ethical configurations emerge from the specific social and cultural milieux, in which its establishment and operation are situated. This thesis uses recent developments of a longitudinal population-based research resource in Taiwan as a specific instance to analyse the delicate entanglement between politics, capital and life sciences. It explores not only the legal and ethical issues posed by biobanks, such as consent, privacy and property, but also the political and economic aspects of the biobanks that are embedded in the broader global bio-economies. This emphasis, focusing on the way in which biovalue is produced, politico-scientific decisions are made and ethical configurations are framed, allows an opportunity to reassess law and ethics, capital and politics, as well as the role of the state and its populations in this new form of biotechnology.

For many centuries the legal profession has maintained a distinct image secured by institutional, organizational and symbolic boundaries. The thesis acknowledges that these boundaries have weakened over time. Of interest to this thesis is one symbolic boundary that can maintain distinction: the professional identity of members of the legal profession. The research has at its focus the identity of a specific group of legal professionals; namely, solicitors in mid-market law firms. The research examines the central constructs of solicitor identity and the dominant influences upon this identity. Answers to this help shape a contemporary account of these professionals. The empirical study begins with the proposition that social identity theory is a viable means through which identity formation can be understood. This is in recognition that membership of a valued group facilitates the formation and preservation of a unique identity. Semi-structured interviews allow access to solicitors’ accounts of their professional identities. The research reveals that respondents struggle to express their own professional identity and their limited reflections lack positive overtones. There is instead a greater concern for outsiders’ adverse opinions about solicitors and more generally the legal profession. Additionally, the research uncovers that the most dominant influences upon respondents’ identity are negative and threatening ones. Processes and mechanisms used by respondents to protect themselves from identity threats were also unveiled; namely, disidentification, displacement of blame, and formulating an identity around ‘what one is not’. The thesis highlights too how membership of the legal profession now has little value and saliency as an identity category for the respondents. Finally, the thesis contributes an empirical study on the under-researched area of solicitor identity to organization studies.

This thesis considers the question of human freedom through the lens of the revival of republican political theory that has taken place in recent decades. In its first part, it distinguishes between different strands of that revival and argues that one of these presents a variant of human freedom which more adequately captures the human condition than does the ideal of freedom traditionally endorsed by liberal thought. It then considers that question of freedom in relation to very fundamental questions of power, law, and the reasons for which we accept the existence of an organised public power in the first place, arguing that the individual finds himself trapped between, on one hand, threats to his freedom which are horizontal, emanating from private parties, and those which are vertical, arising from the apparatus of public power which exists in order to protect man from man. In part two, one of the principal advantages identified for the neo-republican ideal - its aptness for application to the freedom of individuals in relation to each other, as well as in relation to the state - is explored within the specific contexts of the relationship of husband to wife and that of employer to employee. In each case, the relationship between the question of freedom and the specific legal rules which determine when and where public power will intervene against or on behalf of one party in relation to another, most generally the rules of private property, is analysed. It is argued that freedom is primarily a function of the ‘ordinary’ law: that which determines one’s rights and duties in relation to others, and which determines the distribution of property through taxation and spending. On the basis of this account, a renewed republican constitutionalism which focuses upon issues of property within the constitution - as a right protected by fundamental rights documents, and as a potentially distorting factor within the democratic process - is offered in part three. The normative element of republican constitutionalism is not exhausted by the issue of how to organise the organs of the state such that the individual is not dominated by the state: issues of private right being a function of constitutional processes, the constitution must also ensure that its outputs do not force man to live at the mercy of man.

In the last three decades, liberal political philosophy has been increasingly concerned with the nature and extent of the moral responsibilities of members of different political communities to each other. John Rawls contributed to this debate in his final book, The Law of Peoples (LOP). There, Rawls refused to extend his account of domestic distributive justice to international politics and argued that some non-liberal (yet decent) peoples can be members in good standing of the international community. Many of Rawls’ critics maintain that this evidences a double standard, and accuse LOP of being an incoherent extension of Rawls’ political philosophy to global politics. In this thesis I show that the opposite is true. I start by underlining the main discontinuities between Rawls’ accounts of domestic and international justice. I then show that these discontinuities can be explained by tracing the evolution of the idea of public justification in Rawls’ work. Rawls’ two theories of justice are the application of the same idea – public justification – in different political contexts. While the first three chapters are dedicated to the elaboration of this distinctive interpretation of LOP, the final two chapters address Rawls’ accounts of international economic assistance and international toleration. The thesis surveys a number of critical arguments against Rawls’ elaboration of his duty of assistance and his understanding of toleration based on reasonableness. It finds them all wanting, and strikingly off the mark: all seem premised on the idea that a just world is a substantively liberal-egalitarian one. Thus, Rawls’ critics fail both to properly attend to our limited abilities to change the global political landscape (not to mention the risks associated with such attempts) and to understand the implications of any sustainable account of toleration.

The purpose of this thesis is to pursue a grammatical, common sense, reading of some of the contemporary accounts of the workings of law. In so doing it relies extensively on the critical work by Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Stanley Fish, writers assumed to present a somewhat unified perspective on such matters as understanding, language, meaning and reading. The shorter of the two parts, 'Judgement, Criteria, Justice,' sets the stage. Looking at Jean-Franςois Lyotard's discourse, in Just Gaming, of a semantic and moral apocalypse, and his subsequent search for a concept of the just, the first part introduces the principal themes of the essay. These themes at once form some of the major concerns of the contemporary legal theory; the text of the law, the authorial intention, the politics of interpretation, the interpreter, and the limits of interpretation. Chapter 1.1 probes the concept of authorship as formulated by Lyotard. According to him, the modern situation produces a concept of the author that is detached. The modem situation lacks the transparency that characterizes the classical situation, where the author and the reader could relate to one another, and where, therefore, interpretation was a possibility. The Lyotardian concept radically distinguishes between the realms of the author and of the audience, a distinction that suppresses the ineluctably fraternal, attached quality of authorship. Chapter 1.2 is a critique of the concept of judgement Lyotard advances. It explores the two distinct orders within which, according to Lyotard, judgement is practicable: those of faith ('the Jewish pole') and paganism. While both orders exclude the concept of an autonomous subject - a false order which defines the rhetoric of the mainstream Western thought - the homogenous formalism of one, faith, contrasts with the heterogenous localism of the other, the pagan attitude. Questioning the dichotomy, the discussion goes on to argue for a concept of the primordiality of the attached, situated, quality of both the issuing of the judgement and of its possible interpretations, irrespective of the distinct orders of rhetoric – autonomous, heterogenous, religious - in which they are presented. Chapter 1.3 explores the Lyotardian reworking of Kant's categorical imperative and seeks to point out the problematic nature of the enterprise. The discussion questions the idea that a thematic, non-moral, non-political, concept of the just may necessarily function better than one which is of common opinion, and indicates the illusory character of the Lyotardian venture radically to contrast what would be a thematic concept of the just with that which is mere common opinion. Chapter 1.4 continues on the subject of the politics of interpretation - can what would be the unruly, fantastic dictates of morals be avoided on the basis of a universalistic, politics-free, criterion? - to test the opposition Lyotard draws between the Sophistic and the Kantian positions. While from the Sophistic viewpoint a genuine opposition of competing moralities is not a possibility, the Kantian morality makes conceivable the concept of a rational, as opposed to mere opinion-based and rhetorical, choice. The longer part, The Law and Its Readings,' is a reading of some of the motifs of Franςois Gény's Method of Interpretation and Sources of Private Positive Law. Each of the four chapters that make the second part aims to dissolve one of the four binary oppositions that characterize the contemporary scene - polarities that are strictly mere variations on the theme of the dichotomy between the law and its readings, the law and that which is made of it: the text and the extratext, intention and extension, the tame and the freakish, the real and the formal. In the four chapters that form the second part, the logic behind the oppositions is explored, and a grammatical reassessment, which indicates the terms of each one of the polarities ultimately metamorphic and elusive, though, naturally, of possible grammatical use, is suggested. Chapter 2.1 examines some of the contemporary arguments relating to the text of the law. Extratextualist positions such as, famously, Gény's counter the mainstream textualist positions by arguing against the mechanistic conception of the law that is written, all inclusive, and once and for all. Curiously, however, the notion of the law therefore invoked presupposes a notion of the text which might best suit the formalism of the mainstream positions - namely that the text, as opposed to what might tentatively be called history, is the locus of meaning. What follows this markedly positivistic notion of the text, a notion invoked in particular in the extratextualist positions on the interpretation of the American Constitution, is a fear of judgement that would be made on the basis of what is often (as in the segregation cases) an obsolete concept embodied in the text. This fear, in fact, is not different from the formalistic, mainstream-textualistic, fear of what would become of the law in the absence of formally circumscribed, textual, constraints. In exploring the theme, the discussion focuses on certain individual cases, such as the segregation cases of the U.S. Supreme Court, arguments over which have been an integral part of the theory. Chapter 2.2 is devoted to the considerations of the legislative will. Counterintentionalist positions regarding the interpretation of the law, it argues, may in fact suggest an inherent intentionalism, as epistemologically understood, which may in turn point in the direction of a reversal not dissimilar to that of the binary opposition of textualism and extratextualism. The traditional arguments against the mainstream intentionalism seem to gather on two points: first, that intention is a state of mind and therefore impossible to uncover for those who do not have a natural access inside others' heads; and secondly, that even if it were possible to uncover it, what one has with the legislative will is but a fiction, for it refers to, not one, but many minds who could not possibly intent one and the same thing. The discussion seeks to disclose the way counter-intentionalist arguments subscribe to traditional intentionalism by assuming intention as an occult presence, to use two concepts, one Wittgesteinean and one Derridean, together. And it argues how intention as a concept is a possibility precisely because it is in each case a collegiate, fraternal extension. Chapter 2.3 explores the problems of judicial discretion, politics, and the politics of interpretation. It discusses some of the traditional criticisms of judicial review, in particular the countermajoritarian objection, and points out the metamorphic character of some of the positions in the debate. In that countermajoritarianism refuted from a majoritarian viewpoint stands right behind the very idea of constitutionalism, a distinct refuge at once of the majoritarian positions. And the positions that resist the idea of a timid, majoritarian, judiciary appear to be equally paradoxical, for these positions are simply for being ill at ease with the constitutional principle that is countermajoritarianism par excellence. The discussion then focuses on the Dworkin-Fish debate on the politics of interpretation and at once attempts to pin down some of the veins in Dworkin's thinking on the subject of judicial licence. An overall evaluation of the conceptual scheme, potentialities, and assumptions of legal realism is attempted in chapter 2.4. Realism appears to emphasize the part of the interpreter, as opposed to the text, in the event of adjudication, and question the traditional assumptions of formalism whose mechanistic concept of jurisprudence equates the law with its text. While some of the most crucial of the realist objections to the formalistic concept of adjudication have been genuine and insightful.