Chapter 1 starts by exploring the history of the term ‘settlement’. Having traced its emergence in the seventeenth century, the chapter investigates the making of the ‘settlement’ act of 1662. A study of parliamentary records uncovers the emergence of new legislation in the post-Restoration context and illuminates the final stages of the process when amendments were made that shaped the settlement legislation for centuries to come. Subsequent laws led to the introduction of new ‘settlement certificates’. The third section traces the spread of the ‘settlement’ system and its impact on both local administrations and the negotiating strategies of the poor – central issues pursued throughout the book. These explorations draw on records from two corners of England, Sussex in the south-east and Lancashire in the north-west. Additional sources are employed from metropolitan London and other localities.

Biological differences between the sexes are perhaps at their most obvious when considering sporting competition. This chapter considers the law in relation to sporting competition from two distinct perspectives. The first looks at the case law of the European Court of Human Rights as it relates to the participation of athletes with DSDs in the female category. A central theme in this analysis is the importance of understanding the precise nature of a particular DSD before legal analysis can be conducted. The second part looks at the domestic law in relation to sporting competitions and takes the opportunity to examine the first case to apply the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland v. The Scottish Ministers and provide detailed reasons. This is a convenient opportunity to restate the key implications of the case and to address, as the court did, some common arguments advanced to criticise or narrowly interpret the Supreme Court judgment.

When it became clear that gender critical belief is protected in our anti-discrimination law, it was often said that, while such views were protected, manifesting or expressing them was not. This is simply not true. Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects both the absolute right to hold a belief and the qualified right to manifest a belief. The manifestation of protected beliefs is also protected under Article 10, which protects the right to freedom of expression. Because these are qualified rights, it may be permissible to interfere with them where proportionate. Where discrimination or harassment arises because someone holds gender critical views, this will be unlawful. However, where the treatment complained of is a genuine response to the fact or manner of manifestation of a protected belief, the legal situation becomes more complex. In assessing the extent to which is it permissible for an employer or other duty-bearer to interfere with the fact or manner of manifestation of a protected belief, the central importance of freedom of expression must be recognised as the background context of any analysis.

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Baha’i religious minority in Iran has been persecuted by the Iranian government, with varying degrees of intensity. In 2011, former UNAMIR Commander Romeo Dallaire recognised their vulnerability in a speech to the Canadian Senate. ‘The similarities with what I saw in Rwanda are absolutely unquestionable’, he opined, ‘we know the genocidal intent of the Iranian state.’ This chapter will examine the plight of the Baha’i between the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and 2024. During this period, the Baha'i community has experienced ongoing and at times severe risk of genocide. Yet various factors have contributed to preventing the ongoing vulnerability from escalating. This chapter examines persecution of the Iranian Baha’i minority, and the domestic and international response. It examines the interplay of risk and resilience factors that have shaped their experience. The chapter concludes by reflecting on what can be learned about resilience from this case study of the presence of long-term risk.

This chapter explores the application of large language models (LLMs) in empirical legal studies, with a focus on their potential to advance research on EU law at scale. The chapter provides a non-technical introduction to LLMs and the role they can play in legal information retrieval, including the classification of case characteristics and outcomes, which constitutes one of the most common research tasks in legal scholarship. The chapter stresses the importance of validation – researchers cannot treat the output of LLMs as automatically correct and instead must demonstrate the relevance and reliability of measures and results obtained through the use of LLMs in the context of their research topic. While LLMs are capable of significantly reducing the cost of doing legal research, their use will place growing demands on scholars to ensure the integrity of their findings. The chapter also reflects on the distinction between closed- and open-source models and how ethical and replicability imperatives might influence model choices in an increasingly crowded field.

Chapter 4 introduces the transactions cost approach to competition law. This chapter starts by reviewing the theory of hold-up and proposes that competition law exists to protect and promote relationship-specific sunk investment by trading partners. Market power is identified with the ability to engage in hold-up, and the harm from market power is the chilling effect on investment that arises when a trading partner fears hold-up. Exploitative behaviour is identified with an attempt to engage in hold-up.

Exclusionary behaviour is defined as the use of the threat of hold-up to change market structure or prevent entry. The use of vertical integration or contracts to prevent hold-up is discussed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of this approach for elements of competition law enforcement.