Against a backdrop of increasing poverty and environmental chaos, now more than ever there is a need for sustainable communities. The land-use planning system in England is becoming one of the biggest obstacles for those wanting to live in low-impact sustainable communities ‘Land-use planning’ is an ambiguous term, but it is […]

Given their scale and intensity, perhaps the most surprising thing about the 2011 summer ‘riots’ is how quickly they have slipped into the past and how little has been learned from them. Perhaps this vacuity of understanding flows from the almost immediate political consensus about underlying cause: that the confrontations […]

In the absence of a full government inquiry into the riots, the Runnymede Trust was concerned that ethnic inequality and racial injustice, as potential factors in the civil unrest, were too quickly dismissed and marginalised from public discussions. In October 2011, I was part of a research team that went […]

Over 1,400 people in England and Wales have died in police custody or following contact with the police since 1990. Some of the better known include: Jean Dorothy, ‘Cherry’ Groce, Cynthia Jarrett, Blair Peach, Jean Charles de Menezes, Andrew Kernan, Harry Stanley, Mark Duggan, and Ian Tomlinson. Not one officer […]

After more than 100 days of continuous protest, over 200,000 students in Quebec province remain on strike in protest against tuition fee hikes of up to 83 percent. More than twenty universities and vocational colleges have been effectively shut down, and students and supporters have gathered for regular protest marches […]

The police snoop on protests and protesters in many ways. They call it ‘intelligence gathering’. Some of this is done by murky methods, with undercover police and informants, but a lot of it is open, obvious and in-your-face. The Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and their methods of intelligence gathering should […]

How Multinational Corporations Can Be Held Accountable For Human Rights Violations If the story of human rights were a book, 2012 might be seen as the end of one of its most promising chapters.  But first we need to go back to the very first page to understand how this […]

In the mid 19th century, Henry Thoreau coined the term ‘civil disobedience’ when fighting against the American government’s state poll tax – the money from which would be used to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law.  He broadly used this concept to denote individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition […]

Now that the dust has settled upon the latest round of legal action between Occupy and those who seek to evict them from the site outside St Paul’s Cathedral, it is, perhaps, appropriate to take a moment in time to reflect upon the present position of the law and how […]

Law is like life. It begins small and simple and then evolves. The Darwinian struggles to occupy new existential spaces and overcome challenges create new species. Much like ecosystems, young jurisdictions enjoy relatively simple relationships between their constituent parts but more established legal systems are populated with so many sets […]