Summer Conference Events
Are the UK’s Contempt of Court Laws Fit for Purpose in the Digital Age?
In this session, we will look at the UK law on “contempt by publication” as set out in the 1981 Contempt of Court Act and discuss whether that law - post the Lucy Letby trial (where an article in The New Yorker was geo-blocked) - and the Southport killings (where the police appeared to believe the law restricted what they could say about the perpetrator of the stabbings, so allowing misinformation to spread), is no longer fit for purpose in the digital age.
Investor-State Disputes: Exposing Shadowy Threats to Democracy
Multinational corporations and investors have filed almost 1,000 legal cases against entire countries at an obscure branch of the World Bank. Such cases have been successfully used by corporations to circumvent environmental regulations, as well as post-apartheid policies in South Africa designed to empower black communities.
The Limits of FOIA
Presentation: Nicholson Baker vs the CIA Nearly a decade ago, while investigating the possibility that the United States had used biological weapons in the Korean War, one of America’s most inventive and challenging novelists Nicholson Baker requested a series of Air Force documents under the provisions of the U.S.