Quarterly Research Highlights
This page provides a spotlight on some of the most recent activity in the School of Law, with news about publications, speaking engagements and funded research over the last few months.
View a selection of current and recent research activity in the School of Law. More details about these and other researchers, projects, publications, events, etc. and about the work of our Research centres, can be found via the Law School research index page and the academic staff pages.
Commercial and Private Law (including Insurance and Property)
Professor Yvonne Baatz, Dr Johanna Hjalmarsson and Professor Andrew Serdy organised an academic conference called At the Cutting Edge of Commercial Law for the Institute of Maritime Law in June 2016. Academics from other universities in the United Kingdom joined speakers from the Institute of Maritime Law and Sir Richard Aikens, former Court of Appeal judge. The conference was held in London and sponsored by the publishers, Informa.
Professor Brenda Hannigan invited a group of leading UK academic lawyers in company law at Southampton Law School to discuss current issues around shareholder power. This was the first meeting of what is hoped to be an annual roundtable event.
Professor Sarah Nield co-hosted a seminar on the Enduring Property Relationships in May 2016 at New College, University of Oxford, with Professor Susan Bright (Oxford) and Professor Professor Sarah Blandy (Sheffield). The seminar was sponsored by the Modern Law Review. Professor Nield was also an invited discussant at two international conferences in May 2016. The first being an EU Consumer Over-indebtedness and Insolvency Conference held at Brunel University, and the second a British Academy sponsored workshop on A Communal Property at Sheffield University.
The Insurance Law Research Group organised a symposium on the law of insurance fraud in July 2016. Three prominent US academics, Professors Jay Feinman, Rick Swedloff and Adam Scales spoke, alongside Professor James Davey, Dr Johanna Hjalmarsson and Dr Meixian Song from Southampton and Katie Richards from Cardiff University. The event was an opportunity not just to discuss the law on fraudulent insurance claims, which is currently undergoing some comprehensive changes, but also for the Insurance Law Research Group to forge closer contacts with an important insurance law research epicentre in the US, Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Maritime and Shipping Law
Professor Yvonne Baatz contributed a chapter entitled ‘Incorporation of a Charterparty Arbitration Clause into a Bill of Lading and its Effect on Third Parties’ to a book on The Role of Arbitration in Shipping Law edited by Miriam Goldby and Loukas Mistelis published by Oxford University Press in June 2016.
Professor Andrew Serdy gave an interview to Share Radio on the dispute in the South China Sea between China and the Philippines and where these issues arose from, in July 2016. Details of this and the link to the interview can be found on the IML website in the news section.
The Institute of Maritime Law, along with colleagues from the Law School and across the University held a workshop on Wednesday 13th July looking at the issue of Atmospheric Pollution. This workshop brought together researchers and local stakeholders combining scientific understanding of the pollution sources, identifying legal and policy measures that should be introduced, promoting innovative engineering solutions. A report on the workshop and highlighted possible future steps was produced in July.
Dr Johanna Hjalmarsson and Dr Jenny Jingbo Zhang edited the book Maritime Law in China: Emerging Issues and Future Developments, which has been recently published by Routledge (2016).
Information Technology and Intellectual Property
Dr Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon together with Elena Simperl (ECS) won a grant under the EU's Horizon 2020 research programme, which will fund the Data Pitch Project. Data Pitch will seeks to create a transnational, Europe-wide data innovation ecosystem that will bring together data owners and Big Data technology providers, with startups and SMEs with fresh ideas for data-driven products and services. Data Pitch will start at the end of 2016 and run for 3 years. Dr Stalla-Bourdillon has also published: 1) ‘Internet intermediaries as responsible actors? Why it is time to rethink the e-commerce Directive as well…’ in L. Floridi and M. Taddeo, The responsibilities of online service providers (Springer, 2016); 2) ‘Anonymous data v personal data: a false debate? An EU perspective on anonymisation and pseudonymisation’ Wisconsin International Law Journal (2016) (with Alison Knight); 3) ‘Nobody puts data in a corner: Why a new approach to categorising personal data is required’ in the Computer Law and Security Review (2016) (with Emma Cradock and David Millard).
Dr Eleanora Rosati was interviewed by The Financial Times and US public radio Marketplace on the current debate at the EU level on possible copyright reforms. Dr Rosati has also had the following papers published: ‘Neighbouring Rights for Publishers: Are National and (Possible) EU Initiatives Lawful?’ in the International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (2016); and ‘International Jurisdiction in Online EU Trade Mark Infringement Cases: Where is the Place of Infringement Located?’, in the August 2016 issue of the European Intellectual Property Review. Dr Rosati spoke at the European Policy for Intellectual Property 11th Annual Conference in Oxford in September 2016 on relevant issues facing international jurisdiction in online EU trademark infringement cases.
Criminal Law and Criminal Justice
Dr Harry Annison, Mark Telford with Dr John Boswell (Politics, Southampton) held a policymaker workshop 'Penal Policymaking: A collaborative symposium' on 4 April 2016 at the Institute for Government, London. This event brought together a range of senior policy participants and scholars to address criminal justice matters of pressing concern. A summary report is available here: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/396241/
Dr Harry Annison presented the paper 'Experiencing Coalition: Penal Policymaking under the 2010-15 UK government' at the British Society of Criminology conference in Nottingham, July 2016. Dr Annison also submitted a response to the Justice Committee inquiry on prison reform, based on his monograph Dangerous Politics (OUP, 2015).
Professor David Gurnham, Mark Telford and Harry Annison have secured a contribution from the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (£1943) to fund workshops in local schools and a stakeholder roundtable event to promote public engagement with Law School research on sexual consent. The project will explore implications arising from David’s recent Legal Studies article ‘Victim-blame as a symptom of rape myth acceptance?’
Healthcare Law and Ethics
The Centre for Health, Ethics and Law (HEAL) will host its Second Annual Jonathan Montgomery Lecture in October 2016, with Professor Marie Fox (Liverpool) speaking on ‘Framing a New Interspecies Ethics: The Role of Care Theory in the Laboratory’.
Dr Natasha Hammond-Browning and Dr Claire Lougarre were awarded £3392 by the SLSA to run a two-day workshop on Reproductive Futures: Reproductive Choices? This workshop ran in July 2016, and was designed to bring together academics working in the field of human reproduction, from a legal and ethical perspective, to examine the new challenges in this area, as well as engaging with the traditional debates. Dr Natasha Hammond-Browning was also invited to speak at a two-day conference, 'The ethics of uterus transplantation' in Lancaster in September 2016. Natasha spoke about 'Undue concern about uterus transplantation? Or, is ectogenesis the way forward?'
Dr Claire Lougarre presented a paper on ‘A right to (sexual) health education?’ at the New Human Rights for the 21st Century workshop, part of the EU Horizon 2020 HURMUR Project (HUman Rights – MUtually Raising excellence) at Kiel in Germany, in September 2016. Dr Lougarre also presented a paper on ‘Protecting the right to health of non-nationals: bridging the gap through supranational monitoring’ at the Law and Society Association Annual conference in New Orleans USA, in June 2016. Dr Lougarre’s paper ‘Using the right to health to promote the application of Universal Health Coverage for non-nationals?’ was accepted by the Health and Human Rights Journal and will be published in December 2016.
Dr James MacLean has been appointed to serve as a member of the NHS 'South Central - Hampshire A' Research Ethics Committee from 09 August 2016. The appointment is for a period of up to five years.