Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Speaker: Stuart Baran, Three New SquareAbstract: The UK Supreme Court recently gave judgment in Thaler, upholding the refusal of patent applications listing DABUS, an AI, as the inventor. After looking at what the UKSC decided and why, I will consider three broader questions that arise from the litigation: (i) why did the case take the shape it did – in particular, was it driven by questions of procedure more than substance?; (ii) what does the judgment mean for patents arising from AI inventions in future?; and (iii) how do we approach the appropriate division of labour between the courts and Parliament in approaching these questions?Biography: Stuart is Barrister at Three New Square Chambers. He was Legal 500 Junior of the Year in IP, IT and Media for 2018. In 2019 he was appointed to a three-year term as one of two Standing Counsel to HM Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks. He practises in all areas of intellectual property, including: patents, SPCs, trade marks, passing off, copyright, designs and confidential information. For more information see:https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Bio: Oliver Wilson-Nunn is an Isaac Newton Research Fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He recently completed his PhD on prison and film in Argentina at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. He has published on prison education in contemporary documentary film and on prison writing from Cuba. He is broadly interested in the relationship between law, criminal justice, and culture in Latin America, with his new project focussing on the relationship between contemporary documentary cinema and the processes of judicialisation and juridification.Prison, the cliché goes, serves as a mirror of society. Films about prison, according to a similarly clichéd logic, serve as a window onto that mirror of society. In this presentation, I move beyond this focus on reflection and refraction to propose a more materially sensitive approach to what prison-based films can tell us about state and society. I reflect on the institutional relationships between the film industry and prisons to show how the very production and exhibition of film—not just the symbolic force of the image itself—reconfigure the relationships between imprisoned people, non-imprisoned people, and the state. Focussing on Argentina, I consider examples of location shooting inside operational prisons, the use of imprisoned people as actors, and the exhibition of film inside prison from the 1930s through to the present day to trouble a tendency among academic lawyers, criminologists, and film scholars to evaluate prison films in terms of their ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’ representation of real-life prisons. By shifting our focus from the truth value of the strictly defined ‘prison film’ towards the broader social relationships produced at the institutional interstice of prison and film, we can better understand prison, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, not as a ‘building “over there” but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere’ (2007, 242).The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. For more about the CSLG, see:https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-groupThe CSLG organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. A donation would be instrumental in allowing the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to continue its cross-disciplinary work:https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/the-cambridge-socio-legal-group

Judges and jurists employ distinctive, and distinctly different, styles of reasoning. Judges develop the common law cautiously, by incremental analogical development. Judicial reasoning is characteristically practical, even pragmatic, with the resolution of concrete disputes paramount. The stability of the common law depends on strong shared, albeit implicit, understandings about its content. Academia might seem hostile to much of this. Academics are expected to build ambitious theories, to investigate legal rules to their theoretical foundations, to question and reject consensus, and above all to innovate. In pursuing such goals, legal scholars risk misconceiving the nature of the common law enterprise, and overlooking its strengths. Jonathan Morgan delivered his inaugural lecture as Professor of English Law on Friday 26 January 2024 at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.

Speaker: Professor Paul Wragg, University of Leeds Biography: Professor Paul Wragg is Professor of Media Law at the University of Leeds. He has written extensively on privacy and press freedom. His monograph on the compatibility of compulsory press regulation with press freedom was published by Hart in May, 2020. He is co-editor (with Professor András Koltay) of a collection of papers examining comparative privacy and defamation laws, published by Edward Elgar in July 2020 and was previously editor-in-chief of Communications Law (2016-2019). He has been at Leeds since September 2009, having previously taught at Durham University and the University of Birmingham. For more information see:https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Speaker: Associate Professor John Sorabji (UCL)The presentation will look at why England and Wales has, historically, been a 'good forum to shop in' for commercial dispute resolution. It will then consider four challenges to its ability to maintain that position, before turning to practical steps that could and, perhaps should, be taken to enable it to remain a forum of choice for commercial disputes.3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.For more information:https://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/

Legal expert Jonathan Rogers discusses the government's plan to quash convictions of subpostmasters prosecuted by the Post Office based on faulty Horizon software. He explores the challenges in reviewing old cases, the need for a legislative solution, and possible outcomes. Rogers also examines the right to a fair trial, the appeals process, and proposes legislative solutions to address subpostmasters' appeals dilemma.

On 23 May 2014, Professor Philip Allott of the University of Cambridge addressed the Spring Conference of the International Law Association British Branch at the Inner Temple, London.

This is the first interview with Mrs Charity (Cherry) Hopkins, Life Fellow of Girton College, University of Cambridge. Mrs Hopkins was interviews for the first time on 13 September 2023 in the Squire Law Library.For more information, see the Squire Law Library website at http://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent-scholars-archive

Professor Campbell McLachlan was the Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor in Legal Science for 2022-2023. Professor McLachlan was interviewed for the second time on 13 September 2023 at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law.For more information, see the Squire website at http://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent-scholars-archive

The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to circumvent the UK Supreme Court's recent judgment holding the Government's Rwanda policy, concerning the removal of certain asylum-seekers, to Rwanda. The Bill contemplates placing the UK in breach of its international obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention, while forming part of a policy that relies upon Rwanda's adherence to its own international obligations. The Bill is thus at once hypocritical and parochial, given that domestic legislation cannot free the UK of its legal obligations on the international plane.In this short video Professor Mark Elliott explores the legal and constitutional implications of the Bill.Mark Elliott is Professor of Public Law and Chair of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, providing advice to the Committee on a range of legislative and other matters. Mark co-founded the international biennial Public Law Conference series and co-convened the first two conferences. He is the recipient of a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching and is the author of a widely read blog http://publiclawforeveryone.com/ that is aimed at public law scholars, current and prospective law students, policy-makers, and others who are interested in the subject.For more information about Professor Elliott, you can also refer to his profile at: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/mc-elliott/25Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.