Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Racial justice is never far from the headlines. The Windrush Scandal, the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston and racism within the police have all recently captured the public’s attention and generated legal action. But, although the ideals of the legal system such as fairness and equality, seem allied to the struggle for racial justice, all too often campaigners have been let down by the system.
This book examines law’s troubled relationship with racial justice. It explains that law’s historical role in creating and perpetuating racial injustices continues to stifle its ability to advance the cause of racial justice today.
Both a lawyer’s guide to anti-racism and an anti-racist’s guide to legal action, it unites these perspectives to help both groups understand how to use the law to tackle racial injustices.
The legal system today appears to promote racial justice, through laws that prohibit racial discrimination and race hate crimes, for example. The law also requires public authorities to take proactive steps to advance racial equality and to foster good race relations. As this chapter illustrates, though, there are limits to the use of law. In education, criminal justice, employment, healthcare, and housing, legal authorities have been unable or unwilling to grapple with the six concepts of Critical Race Theory set out in Chapter 1: the problem of structural racism, the social construction of race and racism, intersectionality, interest-convergence, lived theory, and the limits of adversarial legal processes.
Diverse communities of the ‘Global South’ contend with environmental degradation. As they do so they confront the world’s largest multinational corporations (MNCs). This chapter focuses on the 2019 English case, Lungowe v Vedanta, in which Zambian residents sued the then London-headquartered mining group, Vedanta Resources. The chapter’s task is to identify the role of tort law in the conflict between MNCs and those exposed to environmental degradation. It will do so by contrasting two types of legal work. Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital presents corporate lawyers ‘coding’ assets – such as the copper mined in Zambia – to deliberately challenge tort law’s capacity to deter or to compensate. Lungowe, by contrast, shows tort law as a site of distributional conflict animated by the work of strategic litigation and interpretation by public interest lawyers and sympathetic judges.
In addition to highlighting the non-neutrality of tort law, and its personal, real-life context, this collection brings issues of social class, ‘race’, gender, marginalisation, vulnerability and harm into conversation with core tort law topics to encourage a more critical examination of the law and its impact on different groups of people. The deliberate welcoming of both diverse topics and interpretations, alongside diverse voices, is intended to help students gain and develop further critical understanding of the goals of tort, whether they are achieved (and if so, who for, and at what cost), or whether tort law serves to perpetuate existing inequalities and division. By including a wider range of voices and views within a core tort law text, we hope to uncover the power imbalances and privileges that underpin tort law decisions and their impact on lived experiences, and provide a useful resource for those seeking to engage with more critical and diverse perspectives on tort.
This captivating book explores uncharted territory in tort law, shedding light on underexplored viewpoints in the field.
The collection brings issues of social class, race, gender, marginalisation, vulnerability and harm into conversation with core tort law topics to encourage a more critical examination of the law and its impact on different groups of people.
Written by experts in the main areas of tort law from negligence to defamation and personal torts, chapters will:
• deepen students’ understanding of the central concepts and practices of tort law;
• uncover the power imbalances and privileges that underpin tort law decisions and their impact on lived experiences;
• amplify under-represented voices by signposting to the work and ideas of scholars that are less visible in the field.
Integrating marginalized perspectives into the curriculum and discourse, this indispensable textbook paves the way for a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of tort law.
This chapter examines how English defamation law treats false imputations of homosexuality before and after the 2013 libel reforms. It explores the evolution of dominant societal norms, key events and pieces of legislation that shaped the trajectory of the LGBT movement in England and Wales, and evaluates the extent to which, if at all, reputational harm for being misidentified as gay or lesbian should be legally recognised.
In addition to highlighting the non-neutrality of tort law, and its personal, real-life context, this collection brings issues of social class, ‘race’, gender, marginalisation, vulnerability and harm into conversation with core tort law topics to encourage a more critical examination of the law and its impact on different groups of people. The deliberate welcoming of both diverse topics and interpretations, alongside diverse voices, is intended to help students gain and develop further critical understanding of the goals of tort, whether they are achieved (and if so, who for, and at what cost), or whether tort law serves to perpetuate existing inequalities and division. By including a wider range of voices and views within a core tort law text, we hope to uncover the power imbalances and privileges that underpin tort law decisions and their impact on lived experiences, and provide a useful resource for those seeking to engage with more critical and diverse perspectives on tort.
This chapter examines the spectrum of actions which encompass the practice of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) and the lack of a framework in tort which applies to this. IBSA falls uncomfortably into a lacuna in the provisions of tort law, especially where the person creating or sharing the images cannot be identified. Overall, despite clear and manifest harm, image-based sexual abuse fails to fall within a single tortious cause of action, or any cause of action, leaving claimants struggling to find a suitable avenue for redress. This magnifies the difficulty that (often-female) victims of IBSA face, increases barriers to obtaining a remedy, not least through cost, and exacerbates harms along intersectional identity lines, leaving marginalised communities at a greater risk of harm. The chapter explores the inadequacies of tort law as it stands for remedying a prevalent, but often hidden, and gendered, form of harm.
This chapter explains why a collection like this is important, locating it within a tradition of critical legal education and scholarship. It explains that it is important to remember that tort law is topical and about real people and their experiences, and appeals to the ‘humanity’ of tort. It goes on to give a synopsis of the chapters to follow.
This chapter explores the limits and radical potential of public authorities’ duties of care to hold the state to account for harms suffered by those who are most marginalised in society. It follows a wealth of feminist and critical scholarship critiquing the abstracted and individualised White, pecunious male subject at the heart of tort law, and the increasingly large body of scholarship demanding a vulnerable human subject be placed at the heart of law, politics and ethics. While the rules on the public sector’s liabilities have been developing, there has been little consideration given to whether there has been a shift in the conception of the subject to whom duties of care are owed and any invocations of vulnerability. This oversight is more significant when research identifying an increasingly prominent role of vulnerability in the context of human rights is considered, given the close – if contested – relationship between tort law and human rights in relation to public bodies’ liability. In this chapter we analyse the nature of the subject in the context of duties of care and explore the relationship between tort and human rights liability.
