Discriminatory bias in algorithmic systems is widely documented. How should the law respond? A broad consensus suggests approaching the issue principally through the lens of indirect discrimination, focusing on algorithmic systems' impact. In this article, we set out to challenge this analysis, arguing that while indirect discrimination law has an important role to play, a narrow focus on this regime in the context of machine learning algorithms is both normatively undesirable and legally flawed. We illustrate how certain forms of algorithmic bias in frequently deployed algorithms might constitute direct discrimination, and explore the ramifications-both in practical terms, and the broader challenges automated decision-making systems pose to the conceptual apparatus of anti-discrimination law.

Constitutions come under pressure during emergencies and, as is increasingly clear, during pandemics. Taking the legislative and post-legislative debates in Westminster and the Devolved Legislatures on the Coronavirus Act 2020 (CVA) as its focus, this paper explores the robustness of parliamentary accountability during the pandemic, and finds it lacking. It suggests that this is attributable not to the situation of emergency per se, but to (a) executive decisions that have limited Parliament's capacity to scrutinise; (b) MPs' failure to maximise the opportunities for scrutiny that did exist; and (c) the limited nature of Legislative Consent Motions (LCMs) as a mode of holding the central government to account. While at first glance the CVA appears to confirm the view that in emergencies law empowers the executive and reduces its accountability, rendering legal constraints near-futile, our analysis suggests that this ought to be understood as a product, to a significant extent, of constitutional actors' mindset vis-à-vis accountability.

This article argues that contemporary regulation of climate change risks and zoonotic disease risks - two seminal risks of our era - is deficient because it fails to account for the most distinctive characteristics of their risk profiles. These risks are part of a special category of intersystemic systemic risks, which are 'compound' in nature: they possess the potential to cascade across different systems and entail a liability to exponential growth across numbers of linked systems. Moreover, climate change and zoonotic disease risks are globalised, ubiquitous and entrenched. Effective governance of intersystemic systemic risks demands proactive regulatory intervention at the early stages of risk creation, and reliance on a more balanced basket of regulatory measures than is currently available. For climate change as well as zoonotic disease risk control, this calls for greater investment in assessment requirements, a less permissive approach to planning and development consent, and a commitment to phase out unsustainable production processes.

This article substantially extends the existing constitutional and legal critiques of the use of soft law public health guidance in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon the findings of a national survey undertaken during the first wave of the pandemic in June 2020, it shows how the perceived legal status of lockdown rules made a significant difference as to whether the UK public complied with them and that this effect is a product of the legitimacy that law itself enjoys within UK society. Based on this analysis, it argues that the problems with the Government's approach to guidance, that have been subjected to criticism in constitutional and legal terms, may also be open to critique on the basis that they risk undermining the public's loyalty to the law itself.

The EU project is at an inflection point. Intra-EU alliances are altering following the UK's departure, the EU's financial markets remain segmented, and there is limited appetite for completing the Banking Union. The second stage of Brexit negotiations also collided with the Covid-19 pandemic, which has strained economies around the world. These issues amount to a 'polycrisis' for the EU, raising existential questions about its future. This article focuses on one strand of the debates generated within this polycrisis: future UK/EU policy cooperation with respect to financial governance. The article discusses the importance of the financial services sector to the UK and the EU, and examines potential institutional options for future cooperation. In particular, it advocates harnessing dexterous aspects evident within precedents, including existing EU/third country association agreements, to develop a functional arrangement for future financial governance cooperation, which could also lead to closer UK/EU cooperation than currently appears likely.

The concept of proportionality has been central to the retributive revival in penal theory, and underlies desert theory's normative and practical commitment to limiting punishment. Theories of punishment combining desert-based and consequentialist considerations also appeal to proportionality as a limiting condition. In this paper we argue that these claims are founded on an exaggerated idea of what proportionality can offer, and in particular fail properly to consider the institutional conditions needed to foster robust limits on the state's power to punish. The idea that appeals to proportionality as an abstract ideal can help to limit punishment is, we argue, a chimera: what has been thought of as proportionality is not a naturally existing relationship, but a product of political and social construction, cultural meaning-making, and institution-building. Drawing on evolutionary psychology and comparative political economy, we argue that philosophers and social scientists need to work together to understand how the appeal of the idea of proportionality can best be realised through substantive institutional frameworks under particular conditions.

The law in England and Wales governing both the provision of medical care in the case of adults with incapacity and the provision of care and treatment for mental disorder presents serious problems for the principle of patient autonomy. The adult with incapacity has no competence either to consent to or refuse medical treatment but the law provides no statutory structure for substitute decision making on that adult's behalf. On the other hand the law does allow a person with mental disorder to be treated for that disorder despite his or her competent refusal. The nature of these inconsistencies is considered and the implications which flow from the singling out of mental disorder are examined with reference to experience in two Australian jurisdictions. The current proposals for reform of the Mental Health Act are then considered in the light of the conclusions drawn.

This article first considers the tenuous base on which the law of property in the body is founded, and then discusses the practical results of this in the light of the recent furore surrounding events at Bristol and Alder Hey. The authors suggest that neither the consent-based model followed by the official inquiries into these events nor a possible policy based on a full-blown property model adequately cover the private rights of an individual's next of kin or the right of the public to an efficient and reliable pathological service within the NHS. Rather, they propose that a combined model in which a 'cascade of possession' for the recognition of various property interests is initiated by assent on the part of the next of kin and terminates in full possession of the body vested in the execution for the purposes of its disposal. The authors recommend further that any reform of the law should apply property rights to body parts taken from both the living and the dead.