Chapter 1 introduces the main issues raised in Labour Law and its social and economic significance in regulating workplace relations. The chapter introduces the principal sources of labour law in the UK, which include statutes, the common law and European law and the difficulties in securing compliance by employers with those laws. It describes the system of employment tribunals and ordinary courts where disputes are resolved. Finally the chapter introduces some contemporary themes concerning precarious work, work/life balance and human rights at work.

This chapter analyzes the role of peatland management in UK climate politics. It uses this case to develop a notion of “scope expansion” as a feature of the dynamic relation between stability and politicization over time in climate politics: policy regimes designed to ensure a stable environment for the pursuit of net zero end up identifying new objects of governance, generating new political dynamics around the preexisting political relations regarding that object. As the UK’s policy regime became more ambitious, one of these objects was peatland management, central to the pursuit of carbon dioxide removals in the UK context, and thus the “net” side of net zero. The chapter shows that peatlands have their own political dynamics, centered on questions of concentrated landownership, peat moor management for grouse shooting, and social movement campaigns for recreational access to peat moors. Attempts to manage peatlands for climate change policy, mostly through peat rewetting initiatives, encounter these existing political dynamics in ways that mostly limit the potential for rewetting and thus generate needs for repoliticization especially regarding landownership and grouse shooting.

In Chapter 11, Alan Howe, one of the leading figures in the history of British oracy education, offers a personal history of the implementation of oracy over the last four decades. His essay "From Elocution to Empowerment " starts with Andrew Wilkinson’s 1965 work, before discussing what he calls the five ages of oracy: the Prescriptive Age, Corrective Age, Expressive Age, Participative Age, and Reductive Era. Howe argues that these ages represent shifts in perception and emphasis, from correcting speech to celebrating natural language development and encouraging political engagement. By building carefully on this history, he makes the case that oracy can become a major force for empowerment and social change.

Chapter 5 traces the dynamics of our argument about the causes and consequences of IO withdrawal with three qualitative case studies: the US’ withdrawal from the ILO from 1977–1980, Japan’s withdrawal from the IWC in 2019, and the UK’s withdrawal from the EU in 2020. The cases show how states often think of withdrawal as a negotiation tool and highlight states’ long-term striving for “better” institutional arrangements through other mechanisms of “voice” before exit. In each case, we use archival research and media sources to document that the desire for IO change prompted exit, that states used withdrawal threats for negotiation, and that negotiation prior to withdrawal happened but fell short of the state’s goals, leading to withdrawal. In the cases of the ILO and IWC, negotiation continued while the state was a non-member and led to its return in the case of the ILO. The case studies also underscore the effects of withdrawal: Each of the withdrawing states suffered negative reputational and cooperative consequences and sometimes material consequences from withdrawal. International actors chastised withdrawing states, and the withdrawers then engaged in rhetorical stigma management to try to lessen the impact.

Chapter 8 asks how various forms of regulatory brokerage (informal; with state-support; deregulation; international; and, global) are interrelated, and how they have emerged across time in the field of regenerative medicine. A distinction between opportunistic (profiting from discrepancies between jurisdictions to forge collaborations) and active forms of regulatory brokerage (involving activities directed at the creation of regulations) helps to show how awareness of regulation as capital has spread. Extending from individual science-entrepreneurs to larger organisations, including universities, companies, state institutions and international organisations, regulatory brokerage has become part of the entrepreneurial culture of science management. To remain competitive, countries strategically follow the regulatory reforms of competitors, culminating in a cascade of regulatory adjustments and accompanied by the proliferation of regulatory violence. National discussions on regulatory trends in regenerative medicine, suggest that, though differently expressed, competitive desire tends to be an important driver of regulatory reform. But, at the same time, in some countries trends emerge that do not centre on competitive desire but on solidarity and concern for care.

Governments and regulatory agencies make policy through a range of instruments from soft-law guidelines and executive orders to executive rules with the force of law. Based on her book, Democracy and Executive Power, Susan Rose-Ackerman’s essay highlights the link between cross-country differences in rulemaking practices and underlying constitutional frameworks. Based on the US, the UK, Germany, and France, the chapter illustrates how these countries’ disparate constitutional structures help to explain their divergent rulemaking practices. She stresses the existence of policymaking accountability under the rulemaking provisions of the US APA and its absence from the other cases. Nevertheless, whatever the legal framework, the author argues that bureaucrats should take account of outside input as they implement statutory language to make policy choices. The organization of the executive branch should encourage public input and promote bureaucratic competence. Contemporary pressures may indeed be moving all of these countries toward more accountable procedures – not just to protect individual rights but also to enhance the democratic legitimacy of executive rulemaking.

Chapter 5 builds on the observational findings from the previous chapter to test the hypotheses using two survey experiments performed on a sample of British Labour voters. The first experiment manipulates the selective incentives available to members by changing the cost of joining. Not surprisingly, people are more interested in joining when fees are low. The second experiment manipulates the party’s instrumental incentives by stating members can (or cannot) select party leaders and parliamentary candidates, as well as attend events where they may formally participate in determining the party’s future policy direction. The findings support the hypotheses generated by Chapter 2’s formal model: decentralization increases membership, conditional on voter-party alignment.

Considers the international law and practice around asset recovery. Starts with UNCAC Chapter 5 and its genesis, and covers what human rights bodies have said on asset recovery and return. Summarizes the national law of major asset-holding states on recovery and return, and looks at four different models for returning assets to states where they were stolen while avoiding those same assets being re-stolen. Considers some of the complications of asset return where the same networks responsible for stealing them are still in power.

This second chapter on transnational approaches to grand corruption looks at other ways to pressure corrupt governments when internal controls like the judiciary or auditors don’t work. It looks at individual or “smart” sanctions for human rights violations or grand corruption in the US, EU, UK, Canada and elsewhere. It then considers cases based on extraterritorial jurisdiction, private standards and certifications, and conditions placed by international development banks and agencies as sources of pressure and redress.

This chapter evaluates anti-money laundering (AML) regulation of crypto-assets in the UK with a focus on the UK implementation of the EU’s 5th Money Laundering Directive. The UK implementation had a broader scope than that required under the Directive; however, there was a lack of specific requirements and guidance on certain potentially higher-risk areas including privacy coins, mixers, and decentralised finance (DeFi). This chapter suggests that specific AML requirements and guidance on these potentially higher risk areas may help ensure the associated risks are effectively mitigated.

In this chapter, we argue that while it has often been suggested that utility models are a product of late nineteenth-century German thinking and that they are foreign to the United Kingdom, utility model protection was first introduced to the United Kingdom in the Utility Designs Act 1843. As such, it is clear that utility model protection has a long established (albeit somewhat tarnished) pedigree in British law and that utility model protection came into force in the United Kingdom some fifty years before its German counterpart. In this chapter we highlight the key features of the Utility Designs Act 1843, the way the Act was received, and speculate on the reasons why the Act was forgotten

Chapter 2 considers the limits of performance translation, drawing from the author’s experiences working with three internationally acclaimed Argentinian theatre artists. The chapter first examines the potential “over-translatedness” of Claudio Tolcachir’s global sensation, La omisión de la familia Coleman (The Coleman Family’s Omission), in which audience identification seemingly transcends cultural difference and risks “over-translatability.” Considerations of the “local” underscore the translational limitations of “American realism” and challenges in staging plays bearing a culturally bound performance style for which there is no obvious US or UK equivalent. A case in point is the grotesco criollo, a tragicomic genre and acting style developed in 1920s Buenos Aires and still informing local theatre making. To illustrate, the chapter discusses the author’s and Rafael Spregelburd’s collaborative search for countering anticipated “under-translatedness” when bringing his plays to US stages. At the same time, the “untranslatable” can function as a productive performance strategy, thus the chapter concludes with an examination of Lola Arias’s Campo minado/Minefield, in which three Argentinian and three British ex-combatants reenact their 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War experiences. While translation is built into the multilingual production through projected supertitles, the untranslatable asserts itself at nearly the play’s end in a provocative moment of untranslatability.