Principal Investigator: Professor Davina Cooper; Team: Emily Grabham (Co-Investigator), Elizabeth Peel (Co-Investigator), Flora Renz (Co-Investigator), Robyn Emerton (Research Associate), Han Newman (Research Assistant).

Are there good reasons for state law to treat people as either male or female or should it step back and recognise sex/gender in ways more akin to how it recognises people’s sexuality, ethnicity or religion? This question is posed by a three-year research project on the future of legal gender, led by Professor Davina Cooper at King’s College London and funded by the ESRC (2018-2021).

Currently, in Britain, people have a legal sex, based on the category recorded at birth. Changing one’s legal sex from female to male (or vice versa) is formally regulated under the Gender Recognition Act 2004. Government consultations have been taking place over proposals to reform this legal procedure. However, this debate begs a more fundamental question: are there good reasons for people to retain a formal legal sex/gender?

This interdisciplinary project explores this question from several angles. These include the implications of removing sex/ gender from legal personhood for different relations of inequality and exploitation; the investments different social groups have in the status quo and in proposals for change; the implications of reform for the continuation of single-sex provision and the development of new gender identities; and the effects of law reform on the wider legislative and regulatory landscape. More generally as a prefigurative project asking a law reform question not yet on the table, this project takes up law to explore wider political questions about gender’s future.

Find out more about the project.

Principal Investigator: Professor Penney Lewis.

Most people want to be cared for and die at home. As people get weaker in the last weeks or days of life, they usually can’t swallow. In the UK, when this happens, it is standard practice for medicines to be given by a drip under the skin to relieve symptoms. Four symptoms are common in dying people: pain, agitation, nausea and noisy breathing (rattle). These can happen even when a drip is in place and are called ‘breakthrough’ symptoms. When they do, a family member is advised to call a healthcare professional (HCP), usually a district nurse. The nurse will visit and give the patient an injection under the skin. But, it can take a long time, often much more than an hour, for the nurse to arrive and give the medicine. This wait can be distressing for patient and carer and the symptom can worsen by the time the nurse arrives. Carers tell us that this makes them feel powerless to help their loved ones.

In some countries, like Australia, carers are trained to give symptom-relieving medicine to their dying relatives at home. We are working with a team from Brisbane, who have 30 years’ experience of this.

We cannot be sure that this approach would be welcomed in the UK, so we need to test it out. When there is uncertainty, the best way to resolve it is to do a randomised controlled trial (RCT). This is a test where, at random, half the patients get ‘usual care’ and the other half the ‘new care’. We hope to conduct a RCT comparing injections given by carers to dying patients looked after at home (the new care) versus HCP-given injections (the usual care). Before doing a large trial, it is good practice to first test the feasibility in a smaller group of patients. Our study is such a feasibility study.

Principal Investigator: Professor Andrea Biondi; Team: Professor Takis Tridimas and Dr Alessandro Spano.

LAwTTIP – Legal Ambiguities Withstanding the TTIP ("LAwTTIP Network"), is a Jean Monnet Network constituted in 2016 on a consortium of three renowned university centres: International Centre on European Law of University of Bologna (CIRDE); the Centre of European Law of King’s College London (CEL); Institut de l’Ouest Droit et Europe of the University of Rennes 1 (IODE).

The project has been designed to foster exchange between academics involved in research and teaching on EU law, policymakers, stakeholders and EU citizens on the trade and investment agreements of the EU by means of: Dissemination through research and teaching activities in EU legal studies, of questions and tentative answers connected to the legal issued arisen in the context of the EU trade and investment agreement; Creation of a forum with EU/Member State policymakers and stakeholders for the elaboration of indicators, including benchmarks, to monitor the TTIP talks and their impact on the EU legal order, as well as policy tools and recommendations to overcome the possible shortcomings; Translation of scientific and policy-relevant outcomes into publicly-understandable outputs.

Principal Investigators: Dr Jillian Craigie, Professor Anthony David (University College London), Dr Hanna Kienzler (King’s College London), Professor Wayne Martin (University of Essex) and Dr Gareth Owen (King’s College London, lead PI).

Team lead by Dr Jillian Craigie: Antonia Alley (Research Assistant), Dr Michael Bach (IRIS, Toronto), Jodie Rawles (PhD student), Dr Isabel Clare (University of Cambridge), Professor Francesca Happé (King’s College London), Professor Matt Matravers (University of York), Dr Paul Skowron (Research Fellow).

Overview:

People generally take their ability to enter legal transactions and relationships for granted, for example, in signing up for a phone contract, giving or refusing medical consent or getting married. However, when someone has a mental disability, protective frameworks in many jurisdictions can restrict the person’s ability to do these kinds of things.

Such frameworks raise vexing questions about the proper balance between protecting the person and respecting their wishes and own way of living. This Wellcome-funded collaboration brings together philosophers, lawyers, advocates, social scientists, psychologists, clinicians and neuroscientists to explore this tension, through an examination of the key legal concepts ‘mental incapacity’ and ‘supported decision making’.

The concept of ‘mental incapacity’ is often used to determine when invoking a protective framework is appropriate. However, developments in international human rights law have called into question the legitimacy of this approach, and have instead emphasised ‘supported decision-making’ as a more appropriate response.

Within the collaboration, Dr Jillian Craigie leads a work stream investigating the meaning and implementation of ‘supported decision-making’. It brings together researchers from King’s College London, University of Cambridge, University of York and the Institutes for Research and Development on Inclusion in Society (Toronto). Central strands of this research are investigating the purpose of decision-making support from a human rights perspective; how ‘undue influence’ should be understood within the support relationship; and how adults with an intellectual disability are supported in decisions about contraception, in England and Wales.

Selected outputs:

Jillian Craigie et al., International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Volume 62, January–February 2019, Pages 160-168, 'Legal capacity, mental capacity and supported decision-making: Report from a panel event'

Paul Skowron (2019), International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Volume 62, January–February 2019, Pages 125-134, 'Giving substance to ‘the best interpretation of will and preferences’

Principal Investigator: Dionysia Katelouzou

Global Investor Stewardship serves as a research group that unites academics worldwide, along with national, regional, and international standard setters and industry professionals. The group's mission is to facilitate the exchange of experiences, foster dialogue, disseminate best practices, guide scholarly efforts, and influence future stewardship policy through evidence-based recommendations. Headed by Dr. Dionysia Katelouzou, the group boasts more than 140 members hailing from 27 jurisdictions across the globe.

Global Investor Stewardship facilitates the exchange of experiences, promotes dialogue, and shapes a global investor stewardship agenda to guide scholarly endeavors and influence public policy. Our objectives include establishing a core network of experts—both academic and non-academic—with emerging expertise in investor stewardship, shareholder engagement, and responsible investment. We aim to share exemplary stewardship practices and provide insights to policymakers, not only in jurisdictions that have already developed stewardship codes or related policies but also in those currently planning to introduce such codes or principles.

Our mission is to drive evidence-based policy, fostering a collaborative environment that serves as the foundation for research outputs. These outputs are intended to showcase cutting-edge research on global investor stewardship.

Find out more about the project