The term art and part in Scots law refers to a form of derivative liability. This doctrine extends criminal liability to individuals who may not have committed the actus reus and, in some cases, may not have had the mens rea. Our understanding of the legal developments associated with this doctrine is limited. This chapter therefore examines the historical evolution of the concept, tracing its roots through selected early sources of Scots and English law. It investigates the extent of legislative reform in the sixteenth century and evaluates, through selected homicide prosecutions from 1580 to 1650, the impact of these reforms on the administration of justice and the prosecution of art and part.

Chapter 6 transitions to the case of the Philippines to provide a comparative analysis of regime complex effectiveness. The chapter begins with a political economy analysis of the domestic actors and interests involved in the energy sector in the Philippines, then delves into the history of geothermal development with an analysis of the impacts of the clean energy regime complex actors on barriers to geothermal development over time. The major findings of this chapter indicate that early domestic political support for geothermal development under the Marcos and Ramos regimes was a response to the exogenous shocks of energy crises. This response to exogenous shocks opened pathways of change that were key in catalyzing geothermal development in the country that later placed the Philippines as the world’s second largest producer for several decades. In the Philippines, an embrace of the energy transition enabled the positive impact of the clean energy regime complex on geothermal development. In Indonesia, domestic political resistance to the energy transition limited regime complex effectiveness.

The book concludes in Chapter 8 with a summary of the major theoretical and empirical findings on the clean energy regime complex’s emergence and effectiveness across Indonesia and the Philippines, and a discussion of the theory’s broader generalizability, further research opportunities, and policy implications and recommendations for fostering energy transitions in a world of complex governance.

This chapter analyses the failure of numerous ‘popish mortgage bills’ in late eighteenth-century Ireland. It contextualizes these legislative efforts not only within the histories of the penal laws and Catholic emancipation, but also within the histories of mortgage law in Ireland, England, and other parts of the British Empire. The bills demonstrated Irish lawmakers’ interest in guaranteeing sources of credit for landowners, and indicated at least some confidence in the protections that would be afforded Protestant debtors by the core doctrine of the equity of redemption. The widespread testing of that doctrine, however, raised new questions about creditor power that informed fears about Catholic power, and these became central to legal and political debate. The failure of these bills reflected common concerns about predation and fraud in credit relations, and particular unease about the ways in which mortgage law might contribute to constitutional change, undermining Ireland’s Protestant ascendancy.

What Trajectory for the Regulation of Transnational Corporate Responsibility?

The framework for transnational corporate responsibility along global value chains (GVCs) is in flux. While the legal mechanisms have generally become tighter in recent years, the development follows no uniform trajectory. With scattered, disparate, and overlapping initiatives and regulatory regimes currently coexisting, it seems an open political question which regulatory paradigm will prevail in the medium and longer term. This chapter zooms in on specific transitional moments in the regulatory evolution of corporate responsibility. The dominant narrative portrays this evolution as roughly two decades of linear progress from ‘voluntary’ (deemed ‘ineffective’) corporate social responsibility to ‘mandatory’ (and hence deemed more ‘effective’) instruments, with each stage reacting to deficits of the previous one by imposing tighter standards, leaving fewer gaps, and allowing stricter enforcement. While this sequential understanding of corporate responsibility with each stage implementing selective improvements indeed captures an important dynamic within corporate responsibility, it paints an incomplete picture. First, it stresses rupture over continuity and thereby distracts attention from shared and structural deficits of the regulation of corporate responsibility across its different ‘stages’. Second, it assumes regulatory discourses of corporate responsibility to be largely self-referential and isolated from broader regulatory developments in other fields. These two limitations have deflected the debate from exposing certain structural difficulties in regulating complex value chains, as well as the deeper political dynamics at play in framing regulatory ‘innovations’.

Against this background, this chapter examines the example of reporting regulation as deployed to address different dimensions of corporate responsibility, including modern slavery. Among the substantive goals on the agenda of corporate responsibility, curbing modern slavery is arguably the most intricate. Intrinsically linked to and sustained by the business model of offshore capitalism, modern slavery forms a ‘viable management practice for many enterprises’ (Crane, 2013: 49).

As many have warned, the expansionism or ‘exploitation creep’ (Chuang, 2014) that characterizes discourses around ‘modern slavery’ has only succeeded in clouding the issue, both legally and politically, rather than rendering it more visible (see also Miers, 2003; O’Connell-Davidson, 2015; Quirk, 2018). As Chuang (2014: 611) explains, this ‘exploitation creep’ has entailed the consideration of an ever-broadening range of practices as falling under the ‘modern slavery’ umbrella term. Chuang centres her attention on two related paradigmatic shifts that have allowed this to happen: the reframing of all forced labour as trafficking and the labelling of trafficking as, by definition, slavery (2014: 611). ‘Modern slavery’ has therefore become a catch-all and highly malleable term, which can include practices as disparate as selling sexual services online, generational bonded labour in India, low-level drug distribution in the UK, and forced marriage.

This ‘exploitation creep’ has produced two broad policy responses. On the one hand, we have seen the emergence of a hegemonic position referred to in the literature as ‘modern slavery abolitionism’ (Chuang, 2014; O’Connell-Davidson, 2015). This locates the source of these ostensibly exploitative labour practices in deviant/criminal entities (organized crime groups and/or rogue multinational corporations). Under the abolitionism paradigm, preventative policies have included the banning or restriction of migration for ‘vulnerable’ populations, often women from the Global South (Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Doezema, 2002; Kapur, 2005; Andrijasevic, 2007; Agustín, 2007); the ‘rescue, protection and rehabilitation’ of individual victims identified in contexts of destination; and the prosecution of perpetrators. Abolitionism invests in moral crusades along an axis of evil, presenting ‘modern slavery’ as an exceptional problem to be driven-out (Bunting and Quirk, 2014) and characterized by methodological individualism (LeBaron and Ayers, 2013: 874). Conceptualizing ‘modern slavery’ as the result of evil criminals or rogue companies, abolitionist policies thus invisibilize the very conditions in which such exploitative and unfree relations thrive. This unnuanced, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach fails to consider historically determined systems and relations of power that underpin exploitative and unfree labour.

Chapter 4 first outlines the Indonesian case study and summarizes key regulations and actors affecting renewable energy development, and then examines the influence of the regime complex and its impacts on domestic policy adoption and reform in Indonesia in further renewable energy development. This chapter reveals evidence of Indonesia’s adoption of climate mitigation and emissions reduction policy resulting from the clean energy regime complex, specifically social learning, policy diffusion and international pressure on the Indonesian government to reduce emissions in the wake of the COP-13 in Bali.

This book is a much-needed contribution to our understanding of labour exploitation in global value chains (GVCs). It brings together diverse voices that illuminate the invisible realities behind the products we use daily. This is a necessary step towards business grounded in dignity and justice. Only through informed study of lived experiences can we understand the full scope of the problem.

In my experience with children who have survived the worst forms of labour, I have witnessed first-hand the cost of unchecked greed. In the late 1980s, a few years after my colleagues and I began rescue work, we witnessed an alarming rise in the number of child labourers in South Asia's carpet industry, driven by growing demand for cheaper carpets in the West. I proposed a first-of-its-kind consumer campaign, which eventually led to the creation of Rugmark (now GoodWeave), a child-labour-free certification label, and helped reduce child labour in the regional carpet industry by 80 per cent.

This is the impact we can create when every person in the GVC – from board members to buyers – acts with compassion. Compassion is not a weak emotion; it is a powerful force, born from feeling others’ suffering as our own and taking mindful action to end that suffering.

Too often, I have seen the price children pay so the world can live in luxury. I have met mothers who sold everything to buy freedom, and fathers who broke chains with bare hands. Their stories are not peripheral; they are central to the hidden engine that powers global trade.

I have said time and again that businesses cannot sustain without human rights, and human rights cannot be protected without effective business leadership. Many governments have failed to safeguard the rights of the vulnerable, while the influence of businesses has grown. This places a moral responsibility on corporates to lead the way.

This volume publishes selected papers from the 25th British Legal History Conference (BLHC), co-hosted by Queen’s University Belfast and the Irish Legal History Society (ILHS) in 2022. In providing this introductory digest of the papers in the volume, the Editors take an essentially chronological approach, reflecting the main theme of the conference. The first five papers address themes from the middle ages down to the seventeenth century, the latter being a period of profound constitutional change in England and Scotland. The next four papers are set in the eighteenth century, a period of profound constitutional change in Ireland. Themes connected to the tumultuous events in Ireland a century ago are the subject of the next section as well as the final paper in the volume concerning a unique archival reconstruction project. A final section contains three papers detailing constitutional change in other parts of the world as well as a plenary lecture by Lady Hale on a profound constitutional change in the United Kingdom in recent times, the ‘bringing home’ of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The so-called ‘Constitution of 1782’ has always been an important symbol in Irish history. By amending Poyning’s Law and repealing the Declaratory Act, the changes of 1782–83 meant that the Irish House of Lords regained its judicial functions, and the Irish Parliament could initiate its own legislation. But whether these changes constitute a significant constitutional change which touched a ‘principal part of a constitutional framework’ and raised ‘an important question of principle’ is necessary to determine. By analysing the economic legislation of the Irish Parliament, in particular the legislation on infrastructure, linen laws and the Dublin Paving Board, this chapter argues that the legislative independence did not influence the subsequent legislation of Grattan’s Parliament. The significance of the constitutional change lies in the symbolic importance for the contemporaries rather than in the legislative changes themselves, which had little effect internally in Ireland or externally in the relationship with Great Britain.

The medieval common law offered few public law remedies, the chief being the negative principle that the king could do no wrong: he could not be sued, but his unlawful actions or commands were void. A new chapter began in the sixteenth century with the development of habeas corpus as a means of challenging imprisonment. Since government rested ultimately on the power to lock people up, here at last was a means of reviewing abuses of authority. Habeas corpus was augmented in the seventeenth century by mandamus and certiorari, to review encroachments on other kinds of liberty. Though the new remedies were used to challenge imprisonment by prerogative courts and other governmental actions, the judges sought to make them palatable to the crown by representing them as the exercise (on the king’s behalf) of a higher prerogative. They were ‘prerogative writs’, capable (in Coke’s words) of correcting ‘any manner of misgovernment’.

Sir John Ross was appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1921, being the last to hold that office with its abolition in 1922. Ross was born and raised in Londonderry, before proceeding to Trinity College, Dublin. Briefly an MP in the 1890s, Ross was chiefly interested in the law. Called to the Irish Bar in 1880, he took silk in 1891. His career as a Chancery barrister, and later a judge, led him to the Irish woolsack. As a result of the Government of Ireland Act 1920, his role as Lord Chancellor was very different to that of his predecessors. However, as Lord Chancellor he took no back-seat role, hearing cases in the newly established High Court of Appeal for Ireland up until his office was abolished. Ross also served as Speaker of the short-lived Senate of Southern Ireland. He retired to Northern Ireland, where he died in 1935.

Partition brought with it severe challenges for the operation of railways in Ireland and in its aftermath the cross-border network declined. This chapter explores the challenges of running cross-border railways against a backdrop of the profound lack of cooperation between the administrations in Dublin and Belfast after partition. Even when both administrations grudgingly recognised that they had to cooperate to make even the Dublin/Belfast route viable, this effort towards partnership was stymied by the complicating factor of Belfast’s relations with London. The railways therefore provide a case study which highlights the challenges of sharing the Island of Ireland after partition, with consequences which run to the present.

This chapter explores the impact of the 1707 Union between England and Scotland on the public law of both nations, specifically the extent to which the Acts of Union can be seen to have unified the public law of the newly created Kingdom of Great Britain by extending English law to Scotland. In so doing, this chapter presents a new and original hypothesis of the Acts of Union which provides a more coherent understanding of the post-Union constitution and the role of English and Scots public law therein. It shows that the Acts of Union, by necessary implication of the creation of Britain-wide institutions, unified public law throughout England and Scotland in relation to those institutions, thus creating a new but partial body of British common law. In other areas of public law, variation between England and Scotland remains possible.