The social security appointee system.
Abstract The aim of this article is to analyse the operation of the social security appointee system, evaluating it from the point of view of the claimant, the appointee and the public. Consideration is given to the criteria for appointment, the appointment process, the effect of the appointment and the controls after an appointment is made. The Law Commission's proposals in relation to the appointee system are discussed and further suggestions are made for reform. The background research to the article has focused on the Northern Ireland appointee system which is identical to that operated in Great Britain.
Financial Management and Elderly People with Dementia in the U.K.: As Much a Question of Confusion as Abuse?
ABSTRACT This article explores a range of issues relating to financial management and elderly people with dementia. The law relating to personal finances for those who lack capacity is outlined and discussed with a stress upon its complexity and the key gaps in present coverage. The article goes on to outline findings from research on these issues carried out within a social services authority in the north of England. Professionals were found to have a wide range of anxieties relating to what they felt was the financial abuse of their elderly clients with dementia, as well as more general concern about how best to deal with financial issues for this group on a day to day basis. The financial abuse of elderly people does occur, but the article concludes by arguing that the issues raised by the research are wider for three main reasons. First, relatives and professionals are often ignorant or confused by the options available to them rather than being intent on defrauding elderly people. Second, the desire to hand down and to receive money from the one generation to the next is a powerful force in society and elderly people with dementia may wish their children rather than the state to have their money. And third, fee assessment and collection for this group raise real practical challenges to social services.
Two weddings and a lawsuit: Marriage litigation in fourteenth-century Portugal
Based on one of the few surviving records of marriage cases brought before
 ecclesiastical courts in fourteenth-century Portugal, this article offers a rare
 glimpse of marriage practice in a small village in a remote corner of Western Europe
 and the complex ties that bound its inhabitants and which secular and ecclesiastical
 authorities sought to regulate. Clear parallels can be drawn with the patterns of
 marriage litigation observed in England and Northern France, but evidence also
 suggests that royal legislation played an important part in the resolution of marital
 disputes and in the shaping of conjugal behaviour.