LIFE. SEX. RACE. POWER. FREE SPEECH. PROTEST. PRIVACY. DEMOCRACY. SOVEREIGNTY. DEATH. Society shapes law... and law shapes society. We like to imagine that progress comes about when Parliament spots a looming groundswell in public opinion and responds by changing the laws that govern our daily lives. This is not always true. In this fascinating book, Inigo Bing unravels ten legal cases in which the decisions of judges or a jury either heralded a shift in outlook or forced Parliament to respond to simmering social change. Some of these cases demonstrate the role judges have in defending our civil liberties against overweening executive power, articulating inherent unwritten rights Parliament would prefer to keep quiet about. Others explore what happens when rapid technological or social change outpaces government, placing urgent ethical dilemmas in the lap of the court. All of them have had a lasting impact on the society we inhabit. Taken together, these stories provide a powerful insight into eighty years of British social, political and cultural history, illustrating why legal cases are just as important to making our world as laws written by Parliament or grassroots changes within society.

Law shapes society and society shapes law. In the nineteenth century, the law concentrated on setting the legal boundaries to the social cost of progress. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced new challenges that were unknown to Victorians and Edwardians. Personal identity and autonomy, equal citizenship, the relationship of citizens to those in power, the freedom to protest and to speak freely and a belief that there can be choices about life and death have now assumed an importance they never had in times past. Law now encompasses ethics and morals. While we expect Parliament to reflect public opinion and to revise or repeal laws to respond to changes in public perception, this has not always happened in modern times. It has been legal cases in the courts which have also identified the need for change. This book tells the stories of ten cases which came before the courts where the decision of judges or a jury had a lasting impact on the society we inhabit. Three of the cases, on power, democracy and sovereignty, demonstrate the role judges can have in curbing the unlawful use of executive power. While the principles of free speech were judicially established in the 1970s, what legal limits, if any, should be placed on that principle in an age of cancel culture and the trans rights controversies? Protesters, whether on climate change or war, should have rights, but it is judges, not Parliament, who have protected them. This book looks at ten cases decided between 1942 and 2021. These legal decisions have either sketched the map of future progress or articulated inherent unwritten rights which Parliament would prefer to keep quiet about. This is not a textbook, nor a comprehensive survey, but an attempt to show why legal cases are just as important to making our world as laws made by Parliament or social and cultural changes within society.

This book analyses the history of the common law foundations of consumer law, and encourages readers to rethink the role that consumer law plays in our society. Consumer law is often constructed as purely statute-based law. However – as this collection will demonstrate – this is far from the truth. Much of the history of the common law concerns consumer transactions and markets. Case law has often established or modified the ground rules of consumer markets, has had a patterning effect on the economic organisation of markets, and has expressed cultural visions of the market and consumers. An analysis of landmark cases of consumer law allows many traditional cases to be viewed through a new and distinct lens, providing significant academic and intellectual value. The collection also includes a unique socio-legal perspective, considering the role that consumer law has played in addressing racial discrimination, LGBTQ challenges and the rights of women. This collection of landmark cases demonstrates the theoretical and practical significance of consumer law through a wide range of contributions by distinguished authors from the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States and Australia.

In a Britain that is becoming increasingly fractious and intolerant, the responsibility for upholding the values of broadmindedness, pluralism and individual freedom is passing from the politicians to the judges. But the bonds of trust that bind people to their institutions are breaking down, and the values underpinning judicial law-making are now under threat from a new populism. Using vivid examples from the fall-out from Brexit, the threat to parliamentary democracy, the impact of terrorism and austerity and the actions of politicians trying to prevent judicial oversight of ministerial power, this book warns that the rule of law is a fragile ingredient of democracy which may too easily become side-lined unless it is vigorously upheld. Inigo Bing has spent his life in the law, first as a barrister and then as a judge, and has observed first-hand how values once regarded as sacred are now at risk from a new form of anger-driven and distrustful politics.

This is the story of modern Britain, focusing on twelve formative days in the history of the United Kingdom over the last five decades. By describing what happened on those days and the subsequent consequences, Andrew Hindmoor paints a suggestive - and to some perhaps provocative - portrait of what we have become and how we got here. Everyone will have their own list of the truly formative moments in British history over the last five decades. The twelve days selected for this book are: - The 28th of September 1976. The day Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan renounced Keynesian economics. - The 4th of May 1979. The day Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister. - The 3rd of March 1985. The day the miners' strike ended. - The 20th of September 1988. The day of Margaret Thatcher's 'Bruges speech'. - The 18th of May 1992. The day the television rights for the Premier League were sold to BskyB. - The 22nd of April 1993. The day that young black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racist thugs. - The 10th April 1998. The day of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. - The 11th of September 2001. The day of the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States. - The 5th of December 2004. The day Chris Cramp and Matthew Roche became the first gay couple in the UK to become civil partners under the Civil Partnership Act. - The 13th of September 2007. The day the BBC reported that the Northern Rock bank was in trouble. - The 8th of May 2009. The day The Daily Telegraph began to publish details of MPs' expense claims. - The 1st of February 2017. The day the House of Commons voted to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union.

This book offers a fully up-to-date and comprehensive guide to religion in Britain since 1945. A team of leading scholars provide a fresh analysis and overview, with a particular focus on diversity and change. They examine: relations between religious and secular beliefs and institutions the evolving role and status of the churches the growth and ‘settlement’ of non-Christian religious communities the spread and diversification of alternative spiritualities religion in welfare, education, media, politics and law theoretical perspectives on religious change. The volume presents the latest research, including results from the largest-ever research initiative on religion in Britain, the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme. Survey chapters are combined with detailed case studies to give both breadth and depth of coverage. The text is accompanied by relevant photographs and a companion website.

In this, the second part of his history of the Industrial Revolution, Richard Brown examines the political and religious developments which took place in Britain between the 1780s and 1840s in terms of the aristocratic elite and through the expression of alternative radical ideologies. Opening with a discussion of the nature of history, and of Britain in 1700, it goes on to consider Britain's foreign policy, the emergence of the modern state and the mid-century 'crisis' of the 1840s. Unlike many previous works, it emphasises British not just English history. It is this diversity of experience and the focus on continuity as well as change, women as well as men, that makes this a distinctive text. Students will also find the theoretical foundations of historical narrative and analysis clearly explained.

Originally published in 1999, this book deals with the cultural and legal debates which have counterposed the right to free speech and the need to protect Christian sensibilities in Britain from the time of the French Revolution to the present day. Central to the book is a close study of the content and public reception of the anti-Christian literature of the 19th century associated with the names G.W.Foote and J.W. Gott, the Freethinker and The Truthseeker. David Nash here also examines a variety of critical-theoretical approaches to blasphemy and blasphemous writing, including postmodernism and the work of Foucault and Said. The book concludes with a detailed examination of 20th-century blasphemy cases, up to and including the Gay News case, The Last Temptation of Christ and Visions of Ecstasy.

Women in early modern Britain and colonial America were not the weak husband- and father-dominated characters of popular myth. Quite the reverse, strong women were the norm. They exercised considerable influence as important agents in the social, economic, religious and cultural life of their societies. This book shows how women on both sides of the Atlantic, while accepting a patriarchal system with all its advantages and disadvantages, contrived to carve out for themselves meaningful lives. Unusually it concentrates not only on the making and meaning of marriage, but also upon the partnership between men and women. It also looks at the varied roles – cultural, religious and educational – that women played both inside and outside marriage during the key period 1500-1760. Women emerge as partners, patrons, matchmakers, investors and network builders.

Distrust of public institutions, which reached critical proportions in Britain and the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, was an important theme of public discourse in Britain and colonial America during the early modern period. Demonstrating broad chronological and thematic range, the historian Brian P. Levack explains that trust in public institutions is more tenuous and difficult to restore once it has been betrayed than trust in one's family, friends, and neighbors, because the vast majority of the populace do not personally know the officials who run large national institutions. Institutional distrust shaped the political, legal, economic, and religious history of England, Scotland, and the British colonies in America. It provided a theoretical and rhetorical foundation for the two English revolutions of the seventeenth century and the American Revolution in the late eighteenth century. It also inspired reforms of criminal procedure, changes in the system of public credit and finance, and challenges to the clergy who dominated the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and the churches in the American colonies. This study reveals striking parallels between the loss of trust in British and American institutions in the early modern period and the present day.