Familial child maltreatment continues to be an area of concern in child protection proceedings which often involves the psychological assessment of parents. Research has demonstrated that a significant number of parents assessed in child protection proceedings report experiences of victimisation in their own childhoods. While the consequences of childhood maltreatment are well known, few studies have focused on the intergenerational patterns of child maltreatment amongst mothers involved in child protection proceedings. This thesis attempts to explore the transmission of maternal child abuse and neglect through systematic review of literature in the field, a study comparing mothers who abuse with mothers who neglect, and a critique of a psychometric measure of personality in parents subject to child protection proceedings. Understanding interpersonal differences in intergenerational neglectful and abusive mothers involved in childcare proceedings may lead to the development of effective interventions which may disrupt the generational transmission of child maltreatment.

Veterinary negligence within the United Kingdom is under-litigated and under-theorised. Further, the owner-property dyadic means those who have suffered emotional harm cannot claim whilst veterinarians lack external guidance on evolving expectations. To address this tension, this thesis aims to provide guidance to veterinarians on their legal obligations stemming from the triangular relationship between veterinarian, owner, and animal, and to advance the position of the animal within this relationship by advocating a best interests approach. At the damage stage, a sentient constitutive property model, in which the reciprocal relationship between owner and animal is central, will be advocated. The veterinarian’s duty will similarly shift from one which protects the claimant’s financial interest, to one protecting the integrity of the reciprocal relationship. Where the animal’s best interests are at risk, veterinarians may be protected from liability where they have acted to protect this interest. Looking to breach, the importance of expert testimony necessitates profession-wide support of these ideas. To achieve this, new professional guidance developed by a representative council who embrace the aims of this thesis is advocated. Grounding these ideas is the position that courts should be alive to doctrinal aspects of vulnerability and reason decisions based on compassion and fairness.

Judges are often reluctant to interact with medical ethics when deciding cases with an inherently ethical content. They sometimes even transfer decision-making responsibilities to medical ethics groups. At times this unwillingness is based on the presumption that medical ethics will be able to perform an effective regulatory function. The problem is there is a wide range of ethical discourse, both official and unofficial; so much it can cancel itself out. Therefore, as a regulatory tool for the medical profession, medical ethics is insufficient for the job. Judges, on the other hand, could arbitrate between competing ethical conclusions. Indeed, there is a strong argument they \(should\). This thesis addresses this timely and complex issue. Judges need to be willing and able to rely on the soundness of their own moral convictions to recognise and deal appropriately with the inherent ethical content in certain cases. In order to do this, they need a decision-making framework that recognises the ethical nature of judicial decision-making, so as to provide judges with confidence in applying moral principles and medical ethics. This thesis will provide such an integrated framework.

Child imprisonment has a long history, one that predates the formal creation of juvenile justice. However, the continued use of prison establishments for children, known as young offender institutions (YOIs), remains a controversial issue. This thesis seeks to advance the debate regarding the abolition of child imprisonment by drawing on empirical research conducted in an English YOI accommodating teenage boys. In so doing, the thesis contributes to the established prison ethnographic literature by developing an understanding of the attitudes and lived experiences of child prisoners, a typically overlooked dimension of prison ethnography. The thesis critically analyses three key themes that emerged from the empirical research: surviving life inside; interpersonal victimisation; and, the nature of the staff-prisoner relationships and the use of power. It is argued that imprisonment is far from a neutral experience. The stark similarities between the lived experience of adult and child prisoners illustrate the futility of attempting to create a distinct secure estate for children whilst retaining the use of YOIs. The differences that do exist only serve to demonstrate the inappropriateness of detaining children in the prison environment. The recent fall in the youth custody population presents an opportunity to finally abolish child prisons.

The main theme of this thesis is judicial reform program in Ethiopia. It examines the three basic issues which are central to the administration of justice in Ethiopia, namely efficieny, access to justice as well as accountability and independence. In spite of the wider scope of the reform efforts in Ethiopia this thesis has, on purpose, focused on these concepts not only because they are in many respects interrelated but also because they account for a bigger part of the problems that are faced by the justice system in the country.

This thesis investigates how we can better appreciate the Roman concept of culpa without incurring in a contemporary falsification of its original rationale. Using a revisited version of Quentin Skinner’s contextualism in light of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, it proposes a deep immersion into the uses of culpa by authors representing different forms of literary expression: Plautus (comedy), Catullus (neoteric poetry), Lucretius (philosophy), Cicero (rhetoric) and Ulpian (jurisprudence). This selection is justified not only by their diverse literary achievements, but also by the satisfactory state of preservation of their writtings. The aim of the thesis is neither to blend these disciplines into a unified narrative, nor to perform an evolutionary inquiry of the legal notion of culpa, an approach exhaustively pursued by great Romanists albeit based on limited data and much speculation. Instead, this thesis looks at specific authorial interventions to understand the concept as close to the original authors use as possible. This approach flows from the understanding that culpa was not used in Latin literature as an abstract notion, but was in fact explored in various contexts involving conflict and judgment.

This thesis considers George Orwell’s response to the emergency legislation of the Second World War. Considering legal and historical sources alongside his biography and corpus it reassesses the impact of Orwell’s works in the context of his patriotism, Englishness and views on the law. This thesis argues that Orwell’s experiences in Burma and Spain established his expectations – as an Englishman – for the law during a crisis. It juxtaposes Orwell’s pre-war anxiety regarding potentially ‘fascising measures’ to his relative silence when emergency powers were introduced in England, suggesting Orwell tacitly endorsed controversial measures, including internment, in the unique context of the early war. The thesis considers wartime compromises Orwell felt were necessary, noting his complicity in curtailing freedom of speech at the BBC, before his critical voice re-emerged regarding the normalisation of emergency powers. New readings of 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' highlight both their resonance with the English wartime regime and the dangers implicit in emergency legal systems, drawing out Orwell’s concern that eroding English values and legal traditions removed a bulwark against totalitarianism. Given his changing positions concerning individual freedoms this thesis consequently argues for a more nuanced appraisal of Orwell’s reputation as an unwavering defender of civil liberties.

States may avoid categorising responses to terrorism as armed conflict and yet still use lethal force, administrative detention and other tactics or procedures more usually associated with armed conflict. States are then potentially able to derogate from certain liberty and fair trial norms under the human rights treaties that some suggest are irreducible if international humanitarian law is applicable. States may also interpret the requirement of humane treatment in line with what may appear to be a lower standard of treatment required by certain of the human rights treaties. This thesis examines whether the fundamental rights to liberty, fair trial and humane treatment differ during responses to contemporary terrorism above or below the armed conflict threshold. The thesis concludes that there is little difference between the two regimes of international humanitarian law and human rights law in relation to the irreducible core of these fundamental rights and so it may not be important, in these respects at least, to be clear whether or not an armed conflict exists in legal terms. However, for these fundamental rights, States parties to any of the regional human rights treaties are increasingly unlikely to be able to claim a lack of jurisdiction and so a rights vacuum for those they would call terrorists during extra-territorial operations.

The Supreme Court of the United States consented in its Empagran decision that the foreign antitrust injury that is in a dependency relationship with anticompetitive effects (antitrust injury) in the U.S. is to be litigated before the U.S. courts. Since this decision antitrust law litigation in an international context does not depend merely on anticompetitive effects in the U.S., but also on the relationship between anticompetitive effect and (foreign) private antitrust injury. This is something that was not present in pre-Empagran cases. The Supreme Court did not provide conditions on the basis of which the relationship between anticompetitive effects and private antitrust injury could be classified as one of dependency. This means that the Supreme Court left the determination of these conditions to lower U.S. courts. The lower U.S. courts, instead of attempting to determine these conditions, have made foreign private antitrust injury even more difficult to litigate before the U.S. courts. There are three factors that contributed to this development in U.S. case law: the understanding of the Empagran litigation; the understanding of the nature of the international context, and U.S. courts taking a pro-active role in delivering their decisions for which the reasoning is difficult to understand. The greatest obstacle that post-Empagran U.S. courts have placed in front of private antitrust litigants is the requirement that instead of ‘dependency connection’ there should be ‘direct causation’ between anticompetitive effects in the U.S. and litigated (foreign) private antitrust injury. This thesis considers the existing theoretical and practical problems of the current analytical framework under which antitrust violation is analysed in an international context. The thesis introduces the new legal concept of a ‘transborder standard’. This is necessitated by the starting position of this thesis that a factual situation under adjudication cannot be only either ‘domestic’ or ‘foreign’, but can also be ‘transborder’. The introduction of the transborder standard to the existing theoretical framework enables (and requires) the analysis of the factual situation under adjudication in its integrity, bearing in mind also the purpose of private antitrust law enforcement and the right of private parties to be compensated for suffered antitrust injury. The transborder standard provides a framework to analyse antitrust claims brought before the U.S. courts by those private parties who satisfy their private antitrust injury outside the U.S. At the same time, the transborder standard does not enable private litigants to take advantage of simultaneous antitrust litigation before U.S. courts and the courts of non-U.S. countries. ‘Transborder standard’ is a new legal concept. Nevertheless, the existing system of U.S. antitrust law enforcement does support it and, consequently, the transborder standard can be directly applied.

This project focuses on the formation of the countryside in the violent encounter of extractive capitalism and resistance movements. My case study looks at land contestation in the Araucanía (centre-south of Chile) between forestry corporations, state agencies and Mapuche rural communities. The project questions the narrow approach to understandings of land in the Western canon as a relation of exclusive ownership. I examine how land is changing its role as a provider of the quotidian and an environmental regulator to become a disciplinary technology of displacement. Through different deployments of notions of land (i.e.: property, territory and patrimony) I developed a typology of land resistance based on the perspective of the communities actively resisting land dispossession and claiming ancestral land. To date, a considerable body of research has sought to explore the restructuring of the countryside in the Global South through political-economy approaches. Instead of using a quantitative analysis to think of global capital expansion over rural peripheral lands, this thesis explores the changing qualities of land in relation to the advancement of land commodification. Thus, I take a relational approach to land, first, to fill a gap in how the production of land has been theorised to date, and second, to show how its contested determination (as a resource) affects the formation of the rural social space. This study will demonstrate how property relations are losing dominance over the management of the ground with the arrival of other landed relations showing that land is more than a thing to be owned. By using the case of the forestry sector in Chile, I explore the corporate takeover of rural lands as a continuation of a long history of expropriation and exploitation of racialized peoples and lands. In order to give context to the current period, I revisit the history of racialized landed relations in the Araucanía arriving to its current forms. This new period of modern-colonial relations will show a new calibration between fixes and dispossessions at the encounter between global corporate interest in land on one hand and indigenous ancestral land claims on the other.