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Assigning IACS cybersecurity responsibility conformant with the UK Network and Information Systems Regulations 2018
Get PDFIndustrial plants constituting a society’s critical infrastructure, for example electricity-generation and water-supply, contain industrial automation and control systems (IACS). IACS nowadays increasingly contain many digital-electronic components whose behaviour is software-controlled. Amongst engineered artifacts, software and thus software-controlled systems are particularly susceptible to functional weakness (‘bugs’ and ‘vulnerabilities’). Such weakness can be exploited by nefarious parties (‘hackers’) to disrupt the critical operation of the plant; a phenomenon called cyber-insecurity whose contrary, cybersecurity, refers to the resistance of the plant to such exploitation. The UK Network and Information Systems Regulations 2018 SI 2018 No. 506 (NIS Regulations) address the cybersecurity of systems within the critical infrastructure, establishing response and reporting requirements for cybersecurity incidents. In January 2022, Her Majesty’s Government issued a call for comments on enhancing the NIS Regulations, following a 2020 review. We derive here detailed organisational reporting and response requirements based on a computer-scientific understanding of the engineering issues, in an environment which includes a central vulnerability-reporting organisation (ICS-CERT, now part of US CISA (CISA, no date), or cyber security incident response team (CSIRT)) as required under the NIS Regulations.
Index words: IACS, ICS, cybersecurity, responsibility, safety, software, vulnerabilities, organisational responsibility, duties, mandate. 
Practitioner Note: the use of electronic signatures in procurement between jurisidictions
Get PDFÁrpád Geréd and Alexandra Prodan discuss a recent case regarding the use of electronic signatures in procurement between jurisdictions. The failure to understand such details when tendering between jurisdictions almost caused a public tender worth € 3 billion to fail.
Index words: Austria; Switzerland; signature procurement requirements; qualified electronic signature 
The Demise of Legal Aid? Access to Justice and Social Welfare Law after Austerity
Get PDFAccess to justice in England and Wales has been undermined by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. These cuts to legal aid came as part of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government’s austerity programme and they represent part of a deeper legacy of antipathy towards state funding of legal services over recent decades. This socio-legal paper draws on interviews across four case studies with those on the frontline of the legal aid sector to draw out the implications of the LASPO cuts, and the wider disdain of successive governments for legal aid, for social welfare law. Vulnerability theory is used to highlight the importance of the legal aid scheme and the threat posed by the cuts. The paper makes an argument that access to justice is a cause that needs to be championed for the good of all in society.
Keywords: access to justice; legal aid; social welfare law; austerity; vulnerability
Can Doctrinal Legal Scholarship Be Defended?
Get PDFThis review article investigates the question whether doctrinal legal scholarship can be defended. And it does so in the light of a new book by Mátyás Bódig that sets out an epistemological defence of this scholarship. The second half of this article critically examines this work, while the first half looks more generally at how doctrinal legal scholarship is defined in the civil and common law traditions and how it has traditionally been defended in the United Kingdom. One secondary question that is considered is whether doctrinal legal scholarship is of any greater value, epistemologically, than scholarship in astrology. The article is sceptical as to whether doctrinal legal scholarship can be defended, except as scholarship providing assistance to the legal profession and judiciary.
Keywords: astrology; Bódig (Mátyás); Dworkin (Ronald); doctrine; epistemology; hermeneutics; methodology; theory
Beyond Advice Deserts: Strategic Ignorance and the Lack of Access to Asylum Legal Advice
Get PDFThis essay explores the role of strategic ignorance in relation to access to legal advice in England and Wales, drawing on the work of Linsey McGoey (2012; 2019; 2020), taking areas of extreme shortage of immigration and asylum legal advice as an example of the wider phenomenon in access to justice. It argues that there is a misplaced belief in market-based procurement to meet advice needs, which leads to a failure to collect evidence to understand whether the market does in fact achieve this. This avoidance of evidence about market functioning and the relationship between demand and provision is facilitated by fragmentation of both policy and operational responsibilities, leaving large gaps for ignorance, in which the accounts and concerns of advice-users are dismissed as not credible. It argues that, in failing to collect adequate evidence about the functioning of the market, the Lord Chancellor is ignoring a statutory duty to secure the availability of legal aid.
Keywords: legal aid; advice deserts; strategic ignorance; asylum and immigration; LASPO Act 2012 section 2