Our sister publication Scottish Legal News spoke to Niamh Hargan about her busy life as a media lawyer and novelist. Lawyer by day and writer by night — literally — Niamh Hargan juggles a demanding job in media law while penning novels in her spare time.
Kapil Summan
The Scottish government's indyref2 bill is ultra vires of the Scotland Act, the Supreme Court has ruled.
Overnight QC Suella Braverman has thrown her hat into the Conservative leadership ring, overnight. Ms Braverman, who threatened to “take back control” from an interfering judiciary upon her appointment in February 2020, practised at the bar before becoming the MP for Fareham in
The Supreme Court has refused permission to appeal in a challenge to the Rwanda asylum plan. The appellant originally applied to the High Court for permission to bring an application for judicial review of Home Secretary Priti Patel's decision that certain people who have made claims for asylum in t
President of the UK Supreme Court Lord Reed has resigned as a judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal a day before he is due to deliver a lecture in Edinburgh on human rights. Lord Reed, who has submitted his resignation along with Lord Hodge, said that he has been "closely monitoring and asses
An elderly man has succeeded in challenging the procedural fairness of a hearing in which he was subjected to an experience reminiscent of Franz Kafka's The Trial, his lawyer said. In 2019, Dr Denis Paling appeared at Ipswich Magistrates Court in a case concerning unpaid council tax relating to a le
Society should adopt asynchronous legal hearings, Professor Richard Susskind has said. Speaking at an online conference hosted by the Judicial Institute for Scotland on what lies ahead for civil justice, the legal futurist laid out developments in the court system that he expects to see.
Bad faith actors are making crypto-political arguments in the legal arena, the Lord Chancellor has suggested.
Defence lawyers around Scotland downed their gowns yesterday in protest against the Scottish government's refusal to promptly disburse payments from a resilience fund it established to help the numerous firms affected by the pandemic. The Scottish government has only paid out £2.3 million of t
A renewed attack on trial by jury in Scotland has been met with scorn from lawyers. A "cross-justice" group led by Scotland's second most senior judge – the Lord Justice Clerk, Lady Dorrian – has proposed a pilot of juryless rape trials in what represents the latest attemp
The claim that juries subscribe to rape myths and are biased against complainants has no basis in empirical fact, a new study has found. The work, undertaken by academics at University College London, is also informed by research that casts serious doubt on the value of mock juries as a proxy for re
Scotland is becoming a state in which the population is forced to conform to the vision and values of the ruling elite, a new book argues. In The Justice Factory: Can the Rule of Law Survive in 21st Century Scotland?, author Ian Mitchell suggests that the country is on the road to becoming an author
The actions of the UK government during the coronavirus emergency this year bear the hallmarks of authoritarianism, Lord Sumption has warned. The former Supreme Court justice noted that authoritarian government promotes "loyalty at the expense of wisdom and flattery at the expense of objective advic
Lord Hope of Craighead has warned that the UK government "will bring our precious union to an end" if it is not "very careful". The former Deputy President of the UK Supreme Court and Lord President of the Court of Session was speaking in the House of Lords on the devolution aspects of the Internal
The UK government's Internal Market Bill is "contrary to the rule of law" and risks destabilising the UK's constitutional settlement, a Lords committee has said. In its report on the bill, which it said is "without precedent", the Constitution Committee added that the government has given no "satisf