Citizen UK 2000 and the European Convention for the Promotion And Protection of Human Rights and fundamental freedoms
This thesis sets out to review the extent to which the European Convention for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms(1) has influenced the political and legal order of England and Wales.(2) Analysis is explored along a number of lines of investigation. 
 
A review of the influence of the ECHR on the constitutional order of the UK is prefaced by analysis of its early influence on the order of the Netherlands, Germany and France.(3) Analysis gives rise to two questions 
 
Does the ECHR, dependent on the signatory-state with its own constitutional arrangement and legal culture, support a claim that a collective enforcement of human rights (4) protection can not exist empirically, therefore can not achieve as a transcending philosophy? 
 
Does the ECHR's apparent affinity with the monist order of the civil-law tradition render it in relation to the UK dualist order an impracticable statement of ideal? 
 
Drafted under the auspices of the Council of Europe, the rights and freedoms of the ECHR are accorded a generic structure, essentially subject to derogation. Whether the ECHR is capable of advancing an effective fon-n of human rights protection, this thesis examines the genesis of the 
ECHR, including its absence of inquisitorial function. Analysis gives rise to the question: 
 
What is to be expected of the ECHR: the promotion of a common understanding of HR intimated by the Congress of Europe 1948, or a collective enforcement of protection inherent in an understanding of the telos of the ECHR? 
 
Narrowing the focus of analysis to the UK, this thesis examines its response to the concern of terrorism, asylum and various aspects of criminal justice and asks: 
 
Whether the concept of HR protection has become the last haven of sui-generis positivism, and if so, the ECHR a raison d'etre of the signatory- state? 
 
With regard to the judicial treatment of the rights and freedoms of the individual post the (5) Human Rights Act 1998(5), this thesis examines the functioning of Section 3 of the HRA. Analysis raises a number of questions: 
 
Does a division in judicial reasoning exist between, and/or within, the higher and lower courts regarding the application of the HRA/ECHR? If so, on what grounds? 
 
Can a universal humanity exist in a legal order where rights are treated as a form of residual liberty remaining after legal restraints are subtracted? 
 
Whether post 2000, a decline in autonomous law has resulted in a convergence of the legal and political and the creation of a national responsive law in which the HR concern of the individual is placed below that of the prevailing Government and judiciary, the findings of this 
thesis are used to test the assertion that: 
 
The Article I ECHR agreement by the UK to secure to everyone within its jurisdiction the rights defined in Section 1, is not matched by a realisation of those rights by everyone within its jurisdiction; 
 
Subject to the sovereignty of Governments and politics of the national judiciary, the ECHR constitutes an order for the popularisation of the concept of HR protection, as opposed to a system for the collective enforcement of the rights and freedom of the individual. 
 
(1) Hereafter, ECHR 
(2) Excluding the legal order and legislative autonomy of Scotland. Hereafter, UK 
(3) Following its ratification by the Netherlands, Germany 
 and France 
(4) Hereafter,HR 
(5) Hereafter, HRA
The Human Rights Act and Parliamentary Democracy
The Human Rights Act 1998 is the culmination of an aggressive campaign for the incorporation into domestic law of the European Convention on Human Rights, a campaign in which the judges joined forces with other political activists. Variously described as 'brilliant';' 'a masterly exposition of the parliamentary draftsman's art';2 and even 'a thing of intellectual beauty',3 the Act has also been greeted as an 'ingenious compromise' between the 'maximalists' and 'minimalists', the former supporting a judicial power to invalidate legislation, as is the case in Canada.4 But although it is purported to reconcile in 'subtle' form the protection of human rights with the sovereignty of Parliament (a claim even more credible after an important but unsung Commons amendment), the Act also represents an unprecedented transfer of political power from the executive and legislature to the judiciary, and a fundamental re-structuring of our 'political constitution'.s As such it is unquestionably the most significant formal redistribution of political power in this country since 1911,6 and perhaps since 1688 when the Bill of Rights proclaimed loudly that proceedings in Parliament ought not to be questioned or impeached in any court or any other place. In the words of Baroness Williams of Crosby, we have crossed our 'constitutional Rubicon',7 at least to the extent that the courts may now declare a statute incompatible with Convention rights. The enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998 was marked by an unusually high quality of debate, particularly in the House of Lords, with powerful performances by the Lord Chancellor and Lord Lester of Herne Hill. The performance of the latter on one occasion was too much for Lord Campbell of Alloway, unaccustomed it seems to cerebral rather than ceremonial contributions in their Lordships' House. Lord Campbell was heard to protest (in a manner dubbed 'offensive' by Lord Ackner)8 about 'these escoteric lectures on law at this time of night', having 'never heard anything like this after dinner' in the 18 years he had been in the Lords.9 He had better get used to it: the law and the lawyers are about to dominate all the debates, at all times of the day and night, before and after every meal time. Indeed in the Second Reading Debate on this Bill in the House of Lords 'full of
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.