Publications

The Social Contract Revisited: The Modern Welfare State

This report summarizes the three-year programme investigating the social contract and the modern welfare state.

Any society can propose a minimal set of circumstances such that persons who are disadvantaged should be compensated. This will lead to policies which equalize opportunities, if not entirely, then at least to a degree.

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Policy Brief

Are Populists Friends or Foes of Constitutionalism?

In this policy brief, Cas Mudde of the University of Georgia sets out a definition for populism and argues that, contrary to claims by the Tea Party and other populist movements around the world, populism is in fact theoretically opposed to constitutionalism.

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Policy Brief

Modern Slavery and Migrant Domestic Workers: The Politics of Legal Characterization

This policy brief explains why migrant domestic workers who enter the UK on temporary visas are vulnerable to exploitation by their employers.

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Policy Brief

Ethical Business Regulation

This policy brief outlines the concept of Ethical Business Regulation (EBR), which aims to foster a business culture of mutual engagement, respect, learning, and constant improvement, based on social trust.

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Policy Brief

Water Rights and Stewardship

To what extent are water rights subject to restrictions based on ideas of stewardship? In England and Wales, the right to water has traditionally been conceived as a property right, favouring existing landholders and neglecting responsibilities towards stewardship, or protecting the water environment from ecological harm.

But there is much debate about the extent to which property ought to be subject to inherent stewardship obligations or whether there is already support for this, theoretically or in practice.

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Policy Brief

Is there still an Economic Right to Water?

This policy brief addresses how the meaning and scope of farmers’ economic rights to access and use water are changing through increasing emphasis on stewardship responsibilities. It outlines how regulation is increasingly seeking closer alignment of water use and stewardship by injecting public interest considerations into the legal interpretation of water rights. This has the potential to enhance the public accountability of private right holders.

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Policy Brief

Private Rights and Public Responsibilities: Recent developments in Scots water law

Water law has been the subject of considerable attention in the Scottish Parliament since its re-establishment in 1999, with five Water Acts passed in that time.

This policy brief examines these recent reforms and considers whether there has been a shift from private rights to private responsibilities, or perhaps, from private rights to public rights, over water resources in Scotland.

The brief will also consider what lessons may be learned in England from the introduction in Scotland of limited competition in retail

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Policy Brief

Water Rights and Water Trading in England and Wales

This policy brief assesses the role of ‘rights’ in water use and water trade in the face of increasing water scarcity and uncertainty caused by climate change.

The ‘water shares’ approach to water pricing and trade has become arguably the leading option for abstraction reform. An abstraction mechanism of this type can make a major contribution to commodifying the use of water while ensuring sufficient water for ‘the environment’.

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Policy Brief

Leveson Reforms, Editorial Freedom, and Press Discussion of Ordinary Members of the Public

Paul Wragg of the University of Leeds assesses the impact of Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations for press regulation on ordinary members of the public.

With reference to cases such as the treatment of the transgender primary school teacher Lucy Meadows by the Daily Mail, he argues that any future regulator will struggle to achieve any meaningful change to the ‘cultural indifference to individual privacy and dignity’ shown by sections of the press, given Leveson’s failure to clearly define, yet insistence on preserving, press partisanship.

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Policy Brief

Media Law after Leveson: A view from the coalface

In this policy brief, the Guardian’s Director of Editorial Legal Services Gillian Phillips presents her perspective on the post-Leveson media law landscape, arguing that journalists are being submerged in a complex network of more and more law and regulation, which threatens not only to restrict but to criminalize journalists’ conduct.

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Policy Brief

A Royal Charter for the Press: How does it measure up to regulation overseas?

In this policy brief, published in conjunction with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Lara Fielden examines the three key qualities Lord Justice Leveson recommended for future press regulation – that it is ‘voluntary’, ‘independent’, and ‘self-regulatory’. These characteristics, which form the basis of the government’s draft Royal Charter, are explored within the instructive context of differing approaches to press regulation in a range of democracies overseas.

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