Venue: Peston Lecture Theatre Graduate Centre Queen Mary University of London E1 4NS Mile End Road United Kingdom

About the Law and Society Lecture

The Queen Mary Law and Society Lecture is a major annual lecture. Past lecturers include Shami Chakrabati, Sir Peter Gross, Jolyon Maugham, Clive Stafford-Smith, Sir Ross Cranston, David Ormerod and Sir Rabinder Singh.

About 'On being able to walk twenty metres' 

The Welfare Reform Act 2012 introduced Personal Independence Payments (PIPs), and in particular the enhanced mobility rate, with its twenty metre test to replacing the more flexibly applied fifty metre test for the higher rate mobility component of Disability Living Allowance (DLA). Rather than modify DLA so as to cure its perceived faults, the Government decided to ignore the past and start afresh. Deploying through the press the rhetoric of ‘Strivers v Skivers’ and ‘the real disabled’, it disregarded the accumulated expectations and security that had been given by lifetime awards to DLA, and attempted to rule out from PIP determinations evidence that had been used to inform decisions on DLA eligibility. The lecture examines the implementation of PIP and shows that the norms according to which DWP operates are radically at variance with those laid down in the Regulations governing PIPs. These developments have been central to the creation of a ‘hostile environment’, under austerity, for people with disabilities.

About the Speaker 

Peter Alldridge has been Drapers’ Professor of Law at Queen Mary since 2003. He has published widely in a number of fields, including financial crime and disability law. In 2013 he was made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. In 2017 he served as a UN expert in Corruption, and in 2017-18 he was the President of the Society of Legal Scholars. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Disabled Lawyers.

[External Link]

Venue: One Essex Court, Temple London EC4Y 9AR

One Essex Court is offering a unique opportunity for students to learn more about life as a woman at the commercial Bar.

This one-day event will include talks and advice sessions, interactive activities and networking opportunities all aimed at providing students with an invaluable insight into the life and work of successful female commercial barristers.

11.00 am Registration and welcome
11.30 am Discussion: life as a woman at the commercial Bar Lunch
12.30 pm Lunch

2.00 pm Advocacy workshop
3.30 pm Discussion: practical tips and next steps
4.15 pm Meeting with a female High Court Judge
5.00 pm Day ends with optional networking drinks

Applications are welcome from students in any year of undergraduate or postgraduate study and any discipline. The application form can be downloaded at www.oeclaw.co.uk/pupillage/open-day and must be submitted by 28 January 2019. Successful applicants will be informed by email by 11 February 2019.

[External Link]

Venue: Bentham House London WC1H 0EG

Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2018-19

About the lecture:

Until recently, courts in authoritarian regimes are largely ignored as it is generally believed that the rule of law and independence of the judiciary could only flourish in a liberal democracy. In the last two decades, there has been a surge of academic researches on the complex roles that the courts could play and have played in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes. Most of these studies were conducted with reference to a unified state. Many of them utilize social sciences or economic models such as game theory or transactional costs analysis, and rely on observations on the outcomes of controversial judicial decisions. In this context, the unique constitutional arrangement in Hong Kong, in which a liberal common law court in a highly sophisticated metropolis and one of the most important financial centres in the world, is encapsulated within a Socialist-Leninist sovereign regime that rejects separation of powers and values of individual liberalism on the one hand but has emerged as the second largest economy in the world on the other, provides a unique and interesting case study on the roles and functions of the judiciary within an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regime. Using Hong Kong as an example, this lecture examines a series of controversial judicial decisions of the Hong Kong courts involving the interests of the Central Government. It is argued that no hypothesis about the courts could be completed without analysing in detail how they actually function, what constraints they face, and what choices and options are open to them in judicial adjudication.

[External Link]

Venue: Anatomy Lecture Theatre 6th Floor, King's Building Strand Campus King's College London WC2R 2LS

Nigel Spencer, former Learning and Development lead at international law firm Reed Smith, and Deepak Malhotra, an experienced in-house lawyer and consultant to blue-chip corporations, discuss the role of the in-house lawyer.

They will describe the variety of opportunities now available for in-house counsel and how their position has gained greater and greater strategic importance over the last few decades.

The talk will also touch on the skills and aptitudes in-house lawyers need in the modern business environment and the future for this sector of legal practice.

The event will be followed by a networking reception

[External Link]

Venue: IALS, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR

Our daily interactions with AI-driven technologies – whether seen or unseen – are becoming increasingly normalised. The use of AI virtual personal assistants (VPAs) in the home are one such feature. Yet, while recent policy documents on AI are quick to note the potential ethical impact of such technologies, little thorough critique has examined how these technologies work to create and reproduce asymmetries of power that fall across, in particular, lines of gender.

The female characterisation of Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), and Cortana (Microsoft) – AI domestic assistants designed to make home life more efficient; the unprecedented walk-out in protest of Google’s treatment of women in November 2018; and the biases toward women ingrained in Amazon’s AI-driven recruitment system, all point to the critical need to undertake this kind of inquiry and to critical consider how the development and use of AI technologies intersect with issues of gender.

In response, the ILPC will be hosting an evening seminar on the 7th March to discuss these and other issues relating to the intersection of women, AI and the law. We seek to canvass issues including biases in algorithmic processing; the invisibility of women’s labour in the production and even design of technology; representation of women in ICTs; and the gendered design of AI technologies, such as VPAs.

Panel: 

Dr Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Roehampton

Dr Sarah Dillon, Director of AI: Narratives and Justice, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence

Dr Reuben Binns, Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Research Fellow, Information Commissioner’s Office.
 

Discussant: Dr Rachel Adams, Early Career Researcher, Information Law and Policy Centre, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies

Chair: Dr Nóra Ni Loideain, Director and Lecturer in Law, Information Law and Policy Centre, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies 

Registration to the event is available here. 

[External Link]

Venue: AG03 College Building St John Street Northampton Square London EC1V 4PB

Maya Lester QC has a wide ranging practice in public law, European law, competition law, international law and human rights. She founded and co-writes the sanctions law blog europeansanctions.com with nearly 6000 followers around the world. She represents and advises hundreds of companies and individuals before the European and English courts and has acted in most of the leading cases including Kadi, VTB, Tay Za, Central Bank of Iran, NITC and IRISL.

The event will be chaired by Panos Koutrakos, Professor of European Union Law, City Law School

[External Link]

Venue: IALS, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR

In the centenary year of women’s admission to the legal profession in the UK and Ireland, the Institute is launching a year-long series of talks, exploring key legal landmarks in women’s legal history, including those relating to matrimonial property, rape, domestic violence, equal pay, and abortion. Speakers are drawn from the contributors to the Women’s Legal Landmarks Project (now published by Hart Publishing, Bloomsbury), which represent a significant achievement or turning point in women’s engagement with law and law reform. The series offers a scholarly intervention in the recovery of women’s lost history and in the development of methodology of feminist legal history, as well as demonstrating women’s agency and activism in the achievement of law reform and justice.

This session covers:

First Women's Refuge, 1971 - Felicity Kaganas

First Rape Crisis Centre, 1976 - Alison Diduck

[External Link]

Venue: Northampton Suite A, University Building City, University of London Northampton Square London EC1V 0HB

Policy Roundtable 3.00pm - 4.30pm

"The Present & Future of the Refugee Crisis"

With panellists:

• Elvana Thaci (Council of Europe, Office of the Secretary General's Special Representative on Migration and Refugees)

• Catriona Jarvis & Syd Bolton (leaders of the NGO ‘Last Rights’)

• Liza Schuster (City, UoL)
• Glenda Cooper (Moderator, City, UoL)

Annual Lecture 5.00pm - 6.30pm

"The Future of Human Rights"

Speaker: Alison Brysk (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Is there a future for human rights in the era of Trump and Brexit?  The post-crisis policies of austerity, coupled with the electoral rise of populist leaders, and the EU’s management of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean have posed novel challenges for the most vulnerable groups.  Moreover, the application of new technologies presents both challenges and opportunities for human rights advocates.  Professor Alison Brysk will address these pressing issues in her keynote lecture.      

Register for the roundtable

Register for the annual lecture

[External Link]