Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School
Any gunslinging sheriff can tell you that if you shoot from the hip you may hit the target but not quite with the precision you wanted. Priti Patel, very much a minister to draw first and ask questions later, is in much this position with her challenge to the police establishment over the weekend on
There is certainly a lot to catch the eye in the SNP’s manifesto published on Thursday. If you look you will find a promise of free bicycles and laptops for schoolchildren, a national care service, and a £33bn National Infrastructure Mission, not to mention an undertaking that there will be no income tax rises to
If you think public health authorities in England are overbearing, spare a thought for the Czechs. Parents who fail to have children vaccinated face being fined or having their offspring excluded from nurseries. Now, in a landmark ruling, the European Court of Human Rights, has backed that policy. But even critics aghast at the thought of compulsory
We have a long experience of dealing with hate crime in Britain. In 1958 nine Teddy boys armed themselves with chair legs and iron bars and set about tormenting any black men they could find in Notting Hill. They were caught and brought before Mr Justice Salmon. The judge was taking no nonsense: he sent
Ofcom’s tight grip on current affairs broadcasts has been likened by some observers to a choking collar. Clive Myrie, one of the BBC’s most decent and best educated correspondents, disagrees. But Myrie’s robust defence of Ofcom’s role, which he put forward in the inaugural Harold Evans Memorial Lecture this week, should trouble anyone concerned with preserving free speech on
When a proposed constitution for the EU was mooted in 2005, many in the UK and elsewhere in the bloc smelt a rat. This looked like a bid to shoehorn national governments into a nascent United States of Europe. The French and the Dutch agreed: and being constitutionally guaranteed a referendum on the matter, both
Meghan Markle hailed her victory in a high court privacy case as a ‘comprehensive win’ over the Mail on Sunday’s ‘illegal and dehumanising practices’. But is that right? If you dig beneath the headlines and read the judge’s ruling, it becomes clear that her victory has much to do with a burgeoning expansion of privacy
The SNP has, until recently, looked unassailable. But amidst the drama surrounding the Alex Salmond inquiry, could a backlash to one of the party’s headline policy proposals sink the unsinkable? Opposition to the SNP’s proposed hate speech law is clearly growing. The Holyrood government assumed that pushing through the hate speech component of its Hate Crime and
Covid aside, how should we sum up the last twelve months? The Year of the Abject Apology fits rather neatly. The past year has witnessed cringing confessions by all sorts of institutions to prior complicity in slavery, colonialism or exploitation in some form or another. University College London is the latest institution to apologise, saying sorry because scientist and
Free speech requires a leap of faith: a belief that even if bad speech does harm, the good done by allowing people to say what they think clearly outweighs it. You either have that faith or you do not. Unfortunately it seems that the Law Commission does not, at least if a recent document it
