Explore Law Faculty blogs on a wide range of subjects
The Law Faculty hosts blogs on a variety of subjects from property law to business law. Please explore these blogs to find up-to-date opinion and research on all aspects of the law.
The Border Criminologies research network brings together academics, practitioners and those who have experienced border control from around the world. Showcasing original research from a range of perspectives, we hope to better understand the effect of border control and to explore alternatives.
The blog is one of the ways in which Border Criminologies facilitates the exchange of ideas as it showcases original research and first hand accounts of border control. It is widely read and attracts an international audience from more than 170 countries. This year the blog had around 100 new posts, including eight book reviews and four themed series, and was visited over 100,000 times.
The Housing After Grenfell blog was established in July 2018 to provide a forum for discussion in relation to on the legal, social, housing and fire safety issues that have emerged since the terrible tragedy at Grenfell Tower. Experts explain the complexity of building regulations, government guidance, and what went wrong with construction. Why, asks Jonathan Carrington, ‘did the Government – and their advisors, BRAC – take so long to update’ the guidance and bring England into line with international norms? Jonathan Evans explains the confusion of having two height thresholds for building regulation, both based on 18m but differently measured. Lawyers discuss the opportunities and difficulties in pursuing legal claims in order to pursue compensation or to get buildings made safe, as well as examining the enforcement powers of public bodies. The most read post explains limitation periods, how to work out when the clock starts to tick and when time runs out, arguing that application of these rules to dangers emerging only since Grenfell - yet created many years earlier - erodes ‘the court’s ability to remedy wrongs or to protect legitimate interests’.
Residents explain what it is like living in unsafe buildings and how they ‘feel let down at almost every point’. Other posts suggest that there has been systemic failure of both regulation and of property law, saying that it is time to ask some big questions about how we sell and own flats, and that it is time to rethink the idea of ownership in relation to multi-owned properties. The blog welcomes contributions, and has quickly become an important space to engage with practitioners, policy-makers, students and members of the public in relation to one of the most pressing social and legal problems of the day.
The Centre is a leading site of cutting-edge social enquiry and world-class graduate education in criminology and criminal justice, with staff and students committed to understanding and addressing contemporary public policy dilemmas.
It has a vibrant programme of research that pursues a research strategy aimed principally at fostering and developing clusters of research activity around seven substantive themes: Security, rights and criminal justice; Penal culture, policy and practice; Politics, legitimacy and crime control; Crime and the family; Psychology, Criminal Justice and law; Victims and victimisation, and Criminal justice, citizenship and migration.
The blog features posts from members of the Faculty and the student body on those themes. The blog attracts over 4,000 readers each month. Recent blog posts have discussed the impact of the smoking ban in prison, policing and mental health, and the cancellation of Shamima Begum’s British Citizenship.
The Oxford Human Rights Hub Blog
OxHRH publishes a daily blog showcasing cutting edge human rights law developments from experts across the globe. We continue to expand our global reach by soliciting blog posts in places where human rights law developments receive little international attention. Each contribution is edited by experienced graduate student editors to ensure the highest standards of quality. By requiring blog posts to be fewer than 700 words and written in straightforward language, we are committed to ensuring that each blog post will be intellectually engaging and simultaneously accessible to legal and non-legal audiences.
The OxHRH blog has an enduring commitment to be an egalitarian space and to cover both well-known and overlooked global human rights developments. Contributing authors range from the most senior experts, including UN Special Rapporteurs and former judges, to early-career scholars, such as undergraduates from developing country law schools
Over the last year, we featured pieces on trans rights in the UK; the criminalization and decriminalization of same-sex relations in Kenya and Botswana; cuts to the budgets of UN treaty bodies; the rights of workers in the gig economy; access to abortion in Kazakhstan and extending the right to vote to citizens overseas in Canada. We have published blogs from many countries including Romania, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Zambia, Austria, India, Chile and the US.
The OHRH blog has been archived by the British library, and our blogs are widely used in students’ reading lists and by legal practitioners, civil society organisations, the media, and the general public. Blog posts have been referred to in the UK Supreme Court, and cited in The Guardian and Time Magazine.
The Property Law blog is the newest addition to the Faculty’s collection and was set up at the start of Michaelmas Term 2019. It is a window into important developments and interesting issues in property and the law, providing accessible and high-quality commentary. The blog provides a great opportunity for members of the Faculty to showcase their research, and already also hosts submissions from writers outside Oxford.
Property is a very broad and diverse subject, and this is reflected in our posts. The topics examined to date include doctrinal questions such as the nature of trusts over the family home, and the operation of possessory title; practical and empirical issues such as housing possession procedures and the concerns of leaseholders as to their limited legal rights; and conceptual questions such as whether data can be held on trust, and how to locate ownership of natural resources. The posts show that property can be very topical – Luke Rostill’s discussion of relative title was prompted by news coverage of a dispute over Banksy’s sculpture ‘The Drinker’ – and that it raises fundamental policy issues also relevant to disciplines such as economics and politics. Ben McFarlane’s post on data trusts explains how the traditional concept of a trust may be of great value in the contemporary debate about controlling the use of personal data, and shows the modern importance of seemingly old-fashioned doctrines of property law.
We hope to provide a stimulating read and we welcome contributions not only from academics, but also from practitioners, policy-makers and anyone affected by and interested in property law.
The Oxford Business Law Blog was founded in 2016 with the objective of creating a leading and truly international forum for the exchange of scholarly ideas and reporting of new developments in business law.
There is already much evidence of the Blog’s global reach and positive impact on policy-making and scholarship. Since 2016, the Blog has featured some 1,500 posts contributed by over 900 authors from around the globe with readers from 150 countries. Research and opinion pieces on Brexit, fin-tech and artificial intelligence and the law have proved particularly popular with readers, and some of these posts have been cited in House of Commons and EU policy papers. More generally, there is ample evidence of the citation of OBLB posts in academic literature.
Each year there is an OBLB conference in Oxford in which academics, judges, practitioners and policymakers deliver talks or papers on a topical theme in business law. These talks typically then appear as a special series of blog posts on the OBLB, and then later in published form. The OBLB conference for 2020 is entitled Fintech Startups and Incumbent Players: Policy Challenges and Opportunities. Look out for this special series on the OBLB later in 2020.
The OBLB is run by a team of academic editors and postgraduate associate editors. The vital contribution made by our associate editors is made possible by Travers Smith’s generous sponsorship of the OBLB.
The ‘Unlocking the potential of AI in English Law’ blog covers a variety of topics and themes related to AI and its application in Law. It also highlights the engagement the project has with other aspects of AI, by reporting on many of the events and workshops that take place within the project. The blog tries to cover themes relating to each of the 6 work packages and has most recently reported back on the Launch workshop for work package 6 (Mapping the LawTech and innovation ecosystem). Followers can expect to be kept up to date with recent events as well as engaging with topics like surveillance and accountability, computer science and Law and the application of AI in Law firms.
