This week’s event announcements are below.

~~~

Law’s Lost Empire? Freedom of Speech and the Media in the World of the Internet, Thursday 22 February 2018

Prof. Catherine (Kate) O’Regan (Director of Bonavero Institute for Human Rights, University of Oxford)

UCL Cruciform LT2, Cruciform Building, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

6.00pm, Thursday 22 February 2018

In the next lecture of the Current Legal Problems 2017-18 lecture series, Professor O’Regan will examine the changes that the internet era has introduced and consider what role law may play in the future in both protecting freedom of speech on the internet, as well as legitimately regulating speech on the Internet.

Find full details and reserve your place here.

Kate O’Regan is the Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, and has had a distinguished career as a scholar, practitioner and judge, including a fifteen-year term of office as a judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Kate has also served on a range of international adjudicative bodies, including as chair of the UN Internal Justice Council and President of the IMF Administrative Tribunal.

The Current Legal Problems lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty-five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London, and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.

~~~

Call for participation

“Researching administrative power”

Workshop

20-21 September 2018

University of Essex, Colchester

The dramatic Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017 illustrates poignantly the need to articulate specific administrative fields (fire inspections, building material regulation, poverty alleviation, housing, financial support to vulnerable communities) and to develop responses across the administrative system (regulation, accountability, learning from past mistakes). Rule-making and implementation of administrative decisions are indeed becoming embedded in a complex administrative machinery, where mapping the allocation of power becomes an extremely daunting task. Currently, two opposite dynamics seem to drive the organisation of administrative decision-making in the UK: one involves focusing administrative power on core tasks of policing and controlling compliance and the other spreading administrative power across a wide range of diverse actors, public and private, at central, devolved and local level.

This situation calls for a systematic investigation into how administrative power is organised and channelled and how rule-making and decision-making are actually organised in the UK. The
distinctive place and role of the law in this process need to be identified. The law is not merely controlling administrative power ex post; it is also framing, organising and channelling how
administrative power is used ex ante. But how does this actually happen?

We invite applications to participate in a two-day workshop on “Researching administrative power” at the University of Essex, Colchester, on 20th-21st September, 2018, organized with the financial support of the Society of Legal Scholars. This workshop is organized by Prof Peter Cane (Cambridge and ANU) and Dr Yseult Marique (Essex and Speyer).

Confirmed participants include: Prof David Cowan (Bristol), Prof Simon Halliday (York and New South Wales), Prof Robert Hazell (UCL, Constitution Unit).

The deadline for applications is 15th April, 2018. For full details, see the event poster HERE (PDF).