Drawing on the theory of practical reasons, John Gardner has offered a seminal account of excuses in criminal law. His proposal is that an excuse asserts that the defendant acted for what she justifiably believed to be sufficient reason for her to perform the offending act although she had no such reason. Despite its theoretical insights, I argue that this account leads to untenable results in certain cases which gives us a strong reason to reject it; this is because it is built on the view that what we have reason to do is determined by all facts relevant to the choiceworthiness of our actions regardless of our epistemic perspective about these facts. Interestingly, Gardner had once anticipated this potential response to his proposal but had dismissed it as a ‘nuclear option’. This article triggers it.

The World Bank's new Business Ready (B‐READY) project replaces the controversial Doing Business index in assessing global business and investment environments and is intended to galvanise legal reform in countries across the world. The project is driven by a set of indicators that measure and compare key facets of countries' business environments. B‐READY includes a ‘Labor Topic’ of considerable significance to future global policy on working life, legal regulation and economic development. This article presents a methodological and conceptual evaluation of the labour dimension of B‐READY to gauge the potential impacts on international and domestic labour law and development policy. Applying a legal‐comparative method, it compares the project's Labor indicators with International Labour Organization standards and trends in domestic laws, revealing significant divergence from these norms and a consequential endorsement of very poor‐quality jobs. We attribute these outcomes to the Bank's enduring deregulatory model and identify significant, new and longstanding, dimensions of this model: a novel bifurcation of labour standards, reflected in B‐READY's scoring system; a continuing failure to recognise the range of laws that shape working life, notably those that can exacerbate or curb informality; and a reinforced yet deficient assessment of the de facto effects of labour laws.

The UK Supreme Court's judgment in In the matter of an application by JR87 and another for Judicial Review , that religious education in Northern Ireland breached the Human Rights Act 1998, turned in significant part on a disconnect between statutory rights and administrative reality. While the judgment is a landmark in the history of the teaching of religion in state schools in Northern Ireland and a significant case in the growing corpus of human rights jurisprudence on religious education, this case note demonstrates how it also reveals the neglected salience of administrative burden – an idea central to public administration theory – to the practice of contemporary public law.

This paper explores how the affordability of rents is addressed in the long‐anticipated reform of the English private rental sector (PRS) by the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. The PRS has doubled in size since 2010, acting as a social housing substitute for some households. Its tenants spend the highest proportion of income on housing costs, with unaffordable rents acting as a driver of poverty. The paper uses key themes from housing studies literature on neoliberalism to track the shift of liability for housing costs to tenants, along with the concomitant creation of opportunities for others to invest in private landlordism to fund their future welfare. Comparing the Conservatives’ Renters (Reform) Bill with the Labour Government's Renters’ Rights Act reveals that, despite cross‐party recognition of affordability as a fundamental problem, there is political unanimity around preserving market rents, and political consensus to maintain current minimal protections against above‐market rent increases. This mechanism requires individual tenants to guard against economic eviction by initiating adjudicative action. Overall, there is remarkable continuity with the preceding four decades that have been dominated by neoliberal‐inspired policies. The identified failure to depart from the market‐dominated consumerist trajectory threatens the improved security of tenure that the Act promises.

This article traces the shifting relationship between the courts, the public, and the media in England and Wales from the 1925 prohibition on courtroom photography to the contemporary regime of livestreamed and recorded proceedings. It situates the introduction of the ban on courtroom images within the first administrative turn of the judiciary, when mechanised record‐keeping and the increasing use of photography by the mass media threatened to destabilise judicial authority, existing class relations, and the courts’ control over judicial meaning‐making. A century later, the return of cameras to the courtroom is analysed as part of a second administrative turn driven by digitalisation, datafication, and the transparency imperative. Rather than signalling a liberalisation of visual access, the reintroduction of cameras has been contingent on the judiciary's enhanced capacity to produce and control its own ‘administrative images’. Today, images of the courtroom operate simultaneously as instruments of surveillance and sources of data within a broader digital infrastructure of governance. The article argues that contemporary open justice, increasingly equated with transparency, no longer rests primarily on public observation of courts but on managed visibility through digital capture, thereby recasting the historic tension between law and images within the logic of algorithmic and data‐driven judicial administration.

Grounds are the fulcrum of equality law. Thus, discrimination is discrimination when it is based on or because of certain kinds of personal characteristics or grounds such as race or sex. But there is no definition of grounds in general or a definition of grounds such as race or sex in particular in equality law. This article shows that in defining the ground of sex as biological sex in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers , the UK Supreme Court has undone the meaning of grounds which had developed in the UK since the first equality legislation came into force 60 years ago. It shows that grounds in equality law have been understood in a functional sense such that they signify a wide range of disadvantages that are attached to them rather than convey some objective or essential information about personal characteristics themselves. In failing to adopt a functional approach to grounds and in particular the ground of sex, For Women Scotland has fundamentally reshaped equality law in the UK.