Northumbria Journals
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Malingered Mental Health: Legal Review and Clinical Challenges in English and Welsh Law
Get PDFMalingering – the feigning of mental or physical health symptoms for external gain – is a significant problem for clinicians, the courts, and society. For clinicians working in mental health settings, it is a complex task to differentiate malingered presentations from genuine ones, with a range of potential legal and ethical questions facing the clinician who conducts this task. Yet, the malingering of mental health problems has a range of potential impacts. For the courts, malingering presents a significant threat to their basic function by acting as a significant impediment to truth. For society, malingering wastes clinical time, leaves the potential for injustice to occur in response to criminal acts, and has a significant financial burden in unwarranted civil payments. The focus of the present review is therefore to review the issue of malingering from a legal perspective, leading to a consideration of recommendations for a clinician faced with assessing a client suspected of malingering behaviour
Book Review: Restrictive practices in health care and disability settings, Edited by Bernadette McSherry & Yvette Maker (Routledge, 2021)
Get PDFA Critical Analysis of the Enactment of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018
Get PDFThis paper presents a critical analysis of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018 (FOSTA), and the debate in the United States Congress that led to its enactment. Although the stated intention of this law was to protect victims of trafficking and for websites to be held accountable for their role in facilitating trafficking, FOSTA was controversial. It was predicted that FOSTA would be ineffective at achieving these goals and that sex workers would be disproportionately affected.
Two methodological approaches were used in order to understand why and how FOSTA was enacted - phronetic analysis (Flyvbjerg, 2001) and Bacchi’s (2009) the what’s the problem represented to be approach. These approaches guided the process of analysis of congressional debates related to FOSTA, and the collection and analysis of additional data.
Based on this analysis, this paper argues that lawmakers and other stakeholders created and disseminated a powerful narrative about sex trafficking in order to convince lawmakers to vote in favor of FOSTA. Those who spoke out against this narrative were ignored or silenced, and those who were expected to be most impacted by FOSTA (e.g. sex workers) were excluded from the discussion. This article gives insight into the lawmaking process and how it can be shaped by various actors and ideologies, and how sex workers are impacted by legislation aimed at curtailing sex trafficking.  
Upholding Racist Heteronormativity: The Anti-Blackness of Prostitution Neo-Abolitionism in the United States
Get PDFThis article will address the present-day racist implications of anti-prostitution “modern day slavery” efforts, referred to in the literature as prostitution neo-abolitionism, specific to the United States. An intersectional feminist triangulation of U.S. sex worker rights ideology, prostitution neo-abolitionism, and racial justice abolitionism reveals how race and gender are coded implicitly and explicitly in U.S. socio-legal efforts. In the U.S., “abolitionism” is commonly understood as a racial justice movement that includes demands to abolish policing and the prison industrial complex (PIC). This ideological triangulation illuminates how prostitution neo-abolitionism in the U.S. uniquely co-opts historical anti-slavery movement language—a movement that was inherently anti-racist— to push for increased legal punishments and increased policing. This is in direct opposition to PIC abolitionists who have identified the system of mass incarceration as “the New Jim Crow” in the United States (Alexander, 2012), and who challenge racial profiling and continued police brutality against Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian people, particularly those who are transgender and gender non-conforming, and those who are (profiled as) immigrants and sex workers
Sex Workers’ Access to Justice
Get PDFIn November 2020, the English Collective of Prostitutes organised a ground-breaking event, Sex Workers: Access to Justice, which brought together sex workers, violence against women organisers, academics, and human rights groups to examine the extent of violence faced by sex workers, what exacerbates the risks of violence, and the obstacles experienced by sex workers when reporting violence to the police and accessing justice. This report records that information and the policy recommendations and campaigning strategies that emerged which would improve sex workers’ safety.
 
From the Field: Law-Related Education as a Branch of Civics Education in the United States
Get PDFLaw-related education is “education to equip nonlawyers with knowledge and skills pertaining to the law, the legal process and the legal system, and the fundamental principles and values on which these are based.” Law-related education is a branch of civics education although there is overlap between law-related topics and civics topics because both areas include the study of the Bill of Rights, the study of the function of government institutions, and the study of one’s rights with respect to voting, jury duty, etc. Often, the terms law-related education and civics education are used interchangeably. However, there is a trend for law-related education to be associated with violence prevention. In this article, I provide an overview of the origin of law-related education, a discussion of a law-related education program that I developed for K-12 students, my reflections on implementing the program, key resources that I found during my planning, an overview of state laws that address K-12 law-related and civics education requirements, an analysis of North Carolina’s civics education requirement, and an overview of civics education programs outside the K-12 classroom
The Journey To Legal Capability: Challenges for Public Law from Public Legal Education
Get PDFCitizens whose rights are infringed by a public authority are often unable to attain a court judgment to challenge those adverse decisions. The trite explanation is the most compelling; judicial review is a prohibitively expensive process. This high cost of litigation combined with the fees charged by public lawyers can make fighting for one’s legal rights inaccessible to those without independent means or publicly funded legal representation. There is no question that this is a complete explanation for many instances of unmet legal need, but this paper seeks to raise another important barrier to access to justice that is seldom discussed in the recent literature.
Legal capability is defined as the knowledge, skills and confidence required to participate in legal systems and to deal with one’s legal issues. It is thought to be improved through programmes of Public Legal Education (PLE). Whilst the author reiterates that legal education is no replacement for state-funded legal advice for the poor, PLE is a crucial tool in helping people to challenge public decision making
The Power of Teaching Police through the Prism of Human Rights
Get PDFAs part of their training in England and Wales, police recruits are required to engage with a complex mix of law, often with no prior background in legal education. In addition, they must learn, understand, and apply the content of a highly descriptive national police curriculum (NPC). The combination of these tasks, amongst other things, can limit the extent to which police training can cultivate critical thinking, a central objective of efforts to professionalise the police in recent times. In this article and based on the author’s experience of teaching law to police recruits, the challenges of the current approach to police training are explored through Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and what he terms the banking model of education. After drawing connections between this model and the current approach to police training, a human rights-based approach to police teaching is offered as an example of Freire’s preferred problem-solving method. Central to this model is utilising the views of recruits regarding the role of the police in balancing rights to help understand the law as it exists
Customer value theory and cryptocurrency regulation
Get PDFCryptocurrencies are the product of disruptive technologies which have the potential to unsettle the global banking sector and, as a result, state-controlled economies across the world. Similarly, their inherent volatility and the relatively unregulated markets within which they are currently traded present a multiplicity of risks from which consumers will increasingly require protection as their popularity continues to rise. In seeking to inform any regulatory intervention, lawmakers are likely to refer to – amongst others – a range of economic, legal, political, sociological, and technological theories to understand the nature and extent of the relevant risks. Customer value theory from the marketing discipline offers an important perspective, which to the authors’ knowledge has not yet been considered. This paper presents the findings of an interdisciplinary, theoretical study, which explored the application of customer value theory to cryptocurrency and its regulation. It is argued that customer value theory offers explanatory insight into the nature of cryptocurrency itself as well as the risks that it poses to consumer traders, and that it thereby constitutes a useful lens for lawmakers as they seek to regulate in this emergent area