This book analyses the development and current position of the Lord Chancellor in his various roles.

The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world. Crewe’s insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work. This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations.

In this report the Liaison Committee conducts a brief review of House of Lords policy committees, in advance of the appointment of those committees in the new Parliament.

In safeguarding national security the Government produces and receives sensitive information. This information must be protected appropriately, as failure to do so may compromise investigations, endanger lives and ultimately lessen its ability to keep the country safe. The increased security and intelligence activity of recent years has led to greater scrutiny including in the civil courts, which have heard a growing numbers of cases challenging Government decisions and actions in the national security sphere. Such cases involve information that under current rules cannot be disclosed in a courtroom. The UK justice system is then either unable to pass judgment and cases collapse or are settled without a judge reaching any conclusions. This green paper aims to respond to the challenges of how sensitive information is treated in the full range of civil proceedings. It looks for solutions that improve the current arrangements while upholding the Government's commitment to the rule of law. It also addresses the need for public reassurance that the national security work is robustly scrutinised, and that the scrutinising bodies are credible and effective. The proposals in this consultation are in three broad areas: enhancing procedural fairness, safeguarding material and reform of intelligence oversight.

This set of essays explores how constitutions change and are changed in a number of countries, and how the 'constitution' of the EU changes and is changed. For a range of reasons, including internal and external pressures, the constitutional arrangements in many countries are changing. Constitutional change may be formal, involving amendments to the texts of Constitutions or the passage of legislation of a clearly constitutional kind, or informal and organic, as where court decisions affect the operation of the system of government, or where new administrative and other arrangements (eg agencification) affect or articulate or alter the operation of the constitution of the country, without the need to resort to formal change. The countries in this study include, from the EU, a common law country, a Nordic one, a former communist state, several civil law systems, parliamentary systems and a hybrid one (France). Chapters on non EU countries include two on developing countries (India and South Africa), two on common law countries without entrenched written constitutions (Israel and New Zealand), a presidential system (the USA) and three federal ones (Switzerland, the USA and Canada). In the last two chapters the editors conduct a detailed comparative analysis of the jurisdiction-based chapters and explore the question whether any overarching theory or theories about constitutional change in liberal democracies emerge from the study.

This Command Paper from the Office of the Leader of the House of Commons sets out a process for post-legislative scrutiny by the Government. The main proposal is that after 3 years any law that has been passed will undergo a review by the relevant Government Department and then Parliament to see how effective the law has been. The publication also includes an appendix with a detailed response to the Law Commission's report on Post-legislative scrutiny (Cm. 6945, ISBN 9780101694520).

This report says Parliament should not introduce any new privacy statute. It concludes that in weighing the competing rights to privacy and freedom of expression, each case must be judged on its own merits. The bar for limiting freedom of expression must be set high, but the courts are now striking a better balance in dealing with applications for privacy injunctions. Criticism that privacy law has been "judge-made", noting that it evolved from the Human Rights Act is rejected. The Committee says the most important step towards improving protection of privacy is to provide for enhanced regulation of the media. The Press Complaints Commission lacked the power, sanctions or independence to be truly effective. Substantial changes to press regulation are needed to ensure that it encompasses all major news publishers including, in time, major bloggers. The Committee makes several recommendations including that the reformed regulator should: have access to a wider range of sanctions, including the power to fine; be cost-free to complainants; be able to determine the size and location of a published apology, and the date of publication; play a greater role in arbitrating and mediating privacy disputes. One possible mechanism the Committee suggests is for advertisers to agree to advertise only in publications that are members of the press regulator and subscribe to its rules. It also concludes that parliamentarians should ensure that material subject to an injunction is only revealed in Parliament when there is good reason to do so

The Routledge Handbook of Law and Death provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary scholarship on the intersections of law and death in the 21st century. It showcases how socio-legal scholars have contributed to the critical turn in death studies and how the sociology of death has impacted upon the discipline of law. In bringing together prominent academics and emerging experts from a diverse range of disciplines, the Handbook shows how, far from shunning questions of mortality, legal institutions incessantly talk about death. Touching upon the epistemologies and materialities of death, and problems of contested deaths and posthumous harms, the Handbook questions what is distinctive about the disciplinary alignment of law and death, how law regulates and manages death in the everyday, and how thinking with law can enrich our understandings of the presence of death in our lives. In a time when the world is facing global inequalities in living and dying, and legal institutions are increasingly interrogating their relationships to death, this Handbook makes for essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners in law, humanities, and the social sciences.