In 2008, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave a speech in which he argued that to maintain support for legal authority in the UK, English law should allow for parallel systems of courts drawing from other sources of law, namely religious law. Dr Williams was speaking specifically of Muslim courts, Sharia courts, and he was postulating that it may be positive for the English law and for English justice in general, to facilitate for a more pluralist legal system in which people can choose which law they wish to comply with, religious or English 1. Dr Williams' speech received a great deal of criticism, mostly unjustified, and this paper is seeking to use Dr Williams' suggestions as a basis from which to critique whether a pluralist court system is possible, or in fact desirable, in the area of family law. By considering predominately Sharia Councils (courts) but also making some reference to the Jewish equivalent, the Beth Din, the theoretical workings of a parallel religious tribunal with be explored and it shall be demonstrate that in reality, such a parallel system is unable to formally function.

This article explores the value of providing discipline-specific writing support to law undergraduates through writing programmes within law schools. By engaging with an "academic literacies" approach to writing skills, this article illustrates a broad understanding of writing as a learning process, thereby exploring why investment in writing support can have such wide-reaching value for students in both improving their academic abilities and improving student employability. By using the case study of Legal Academic Writing Skills (LAWS), situated in Lancaster Law School, this article provides an example of an "in-house" writing programme.

This article seeks to provide reflection and guidance to researchers of fraud in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This reflection explains two reasons why there is a dearth of historical research into fraud offences. These reasons are ontological and methodological. The definitions and laws of fraud are complex and difficult to identify, and one of the most accessible court archive, the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (the Proceedings), needs to be treated with caution by the researcher of fraud. This article uses the in-depth historiography surrounding the Proceedings and applies this to the research of fraud offences which, this article argues, require a particular methodological approach.

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The UK Supreme Court took the opportunity in Ivey v Genting Casinos (UK) Ltd t/a Crockfords [2017] UKSC 67 to reverse the long-standing, but unpopular, test for dishonesty in R v Ghosh. It reduced the relevance of subjectivity in the test of dishonesty, and brought the civil and the criminal law approaches to dishonesty into line by adopting the test as laid down in Royal Brunei Airlines Sdn Bhd v Tan. This paper employs extensive legal historical research to demonstrate that the Supreme Court in Ivey was too quick to dismiss the significance of the historical roots of dishonesty. Through an innovative and comprehensive historical framework of fraud, this paper demonstrates that dishonesty has long been a central pillar of the actus reus of deceptive offences. The recognition of such significance permits us to situate the role of dishonesty in contemporary criminal property offences. This historical analysis further demonstrates that the Justices erroneously overlooked centuries of jurisprudence in their haste to unite civil and criminal law tests for dishonesty.