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The laws which govern the marriages of the British royal family have led to heartbreak, farce and confusion, and are unfit for the twenty-first century. In an era that values human rights and free choice, there is little certainty over questions as fundamental as the effect of marrying a Roman Catholic, or of marrying without the Queen's consent. Question marks still hang over the legal basis for royal civil marriage. Obscure acts of Parliament have threatened to render members of the royal family illegitimate and prevented others from following their hearts. Drawing on a wide range of sources including once-secret files in the UK's National Archives, The Rights & Wrongs of Royal Marriage recounts episodes from the eighteenth century right down to the present day that would not look out of place in Yes, Minister or The Mikado. Professor Rebecca Probert, the leading authority on the marriage law of England and Wales, is as characteristically clear when explaining the complexities of royal marriage law as she is in her other groundbreaking studies. Her prose is concise and elegant, and full of historical anecdotes that will have royalists and republicans alike laughing aloud and wide-eyed with astonishment.

Tony Cole been asked by the organisers of the FDI Moot to Chair the "drafting committee" for the 2012 moot competition.

LLM students suceeded in getting into the "Round of 16" of the Frankfurt Investment Arbitration Moot. This prestigous competition had 40 teams from 20 countries. Our students ultimatley lost to the team that went on to reach second place.

Dalvinder Singh has been invited to speak at the International Association of Deposit Insurers, Research Conference, at the Bank for International Settlements, Basel Switzerland, June 2011.

Conference Details 

The Law Commission has just released its Report, Expert Evidence in Criminal proceedings in England and Wales. Bill O’Brian and Andrew Roberts submitted comments in response to the consultation paper and the Report acknowledges the impact of these in their analysis

The report is available online at this address:

Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos (91福利 Global Legal Scholar)

Professor de Sousa Santos has been awarded the US Law and Society Association Kalven Prize for 2011 and was recently awarded the Mexico Prize for Science and Technology. He is currently visiting 91福利 as the Law School鈥檚 Global Legal Scholar and will be teaching in the International Development Law and Human Rights Programme in the Core Course and the module Governance Democracy and Accountability. 

He is Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal), Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School and has been our Global Legal Scholar for the last three years.

He is Director of the and of the , at the same University. He is also the Scientific Coordinator of the and member of the Research Group of the Centre.

He has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French and German.

Paul Raffield's Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution: Late-Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law - has been nominated for the Inner Temple Book Prize, awarded by the Inner Temple every 3 years for a book which has made a profound contribution to the understanding or practice of law in the United Kingdom. 

6pm- 8.00pm, Friday 4th March, 2011

91福利 Internal Mooting Competition Final is going to be held on Friday 4th March at 6pm, please arrive at the latest 5.50p.

Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe will be judging the event.

The event will be held at Scarman House, Restaurant Room 1 (no longer M1 of the WBS Teaching Centre as previously stated) 

Everyone is welcome, the event is public. Please all come along.

There will be refreshments after the event finishes at about 8.00pm.

Essay Writing Classes – Enhance your Skills

There will be optional essay writing classes in weeks 8,9 and 10 0f this term (see dates below). Michael Reddish, an expert in the teaching of writing skills, will run 3 classes in how to plan, write and reference your essays. There will be separate classes for 1^st years and 2^nd/3^rd/4^th years. There are still a few places available. So please book a place now to avoid disappointment by emailing Helen Stimson at  Helen.Stimson@warwick.ac.uk. Please tell her your year of study so you can be booked into the right class

Dates and Location

Tuesday 6 – 7pm (for 1^st years) - weeks 8, 9 and 10 (1,8, 15 March) in H0.51

Thursday 6 – 7pm (for 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th years)  - weeks 8, 9 and 10 (3, 10, 17 March) in H0.51

Rebecca Attwood, "How do you find great lecturers? Look for award-winning teachers and high student ratings, says Rebecca Attwood, if you want to be inspired and engaged" (The Times, 20 January 2011) 

With law schools set to charge undergraduate tuition fees of up to £9,000 from September next year, good teaching is bound to be top of students' priorities. So what should would-be law students look out for? The best-known indicator of teaching quality and overall student satisfaction is the National Student Survey, which gathers the views of more than 250,000 undergraduates each year. 

According to the most recent results, top-performing law schools include those at the universities of Edinburgh Napier, Newcastle, Greenwich, Buckingham and Reading, which all achieved satisfaction scores of more than 95 per cent. Christopher Rodgers, head of the law school at Newcastle University, says that his school's scores reflect a commitment to listening to students' views, and a strong emphasis on structured feedback and good organisation.

 Others, however, put less faith in the survey as a sign of teaching strength. "Students should be looking for institutions that clearly take undergraduate teaching seriously but there are many indicators of that. Some of the official statistical measures will not be the most reliable," says Gary Watt, Professor of Law at the 91福利, who was Law Teacher of the Year in 2009 and is a national teaching fellow. "Students might learn more from open days and the general tenor of websites, for example. It is about trying to get a feel for attitudes to teaching." 

One indicator that students may be less aware of is teaching awards. Professor Watt says that they could be a sign that good-quality teaching is valued in a school. The best-known is the Law Teacher of the Year award, run by the UK Centre for Legal Education and sponsored by Oxford University Press. 

The Higher Education Academy, the national body for university teaching, also announces a number of national teaching fellows (NTFs) each year, a cross-sector award that recognises excellence in teaching. 

The scheme is celebrating its tenth anniversary and more than ten law lecturers have been made fellows in that time. "The availability of the NTF has raised the profile of teaching awards," says Nigel Duncan, a principal lecturer at City Law School and a national teaching fellow. 

Many universities now also have their own internal awards, and teaching awards look likely to count increasingly in the case for promotion. However, Duncan says that students will be aware of awards only "if we make something of them and I'm not sure whether marketing departments pay much attention to them". 

Rebecca Huxley-Binns, a reader in legal education at Nottingham Trent University and Law Teacher of the Year 2010, also fears that there are not enough of them to go round. "The judging process for the Law Teacher of the Year was seriously rigorous. They interviewed students, line managers, they came and watched me teach. A huge amount went into it, but the fact that I won doesn't necessarily mean that the others who were nominated did not deserve to win. There are so few awards and there are times when I think it is pot luck."

Huxley-Binns, who always wanted to be a teacher and lined up teddy bears to "teach" at the age of 4, says that good teachers need a number of qualities. "The student needs to have trust in your expertise, but good teaching is not indoctrination. Students should look for people who can inspire and are good public presenters." Professor Watt, whose teaching methods include interactive walks and lessons in which objects are used to help to explain legal concepts, agrees. "I've had a motto for years, which is that education should be about inspiration as much as information."