Andrew Tettenborn

Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School

The EU is sliding into a United States of Europe

When a proposed constitution for the EU was mooted in 2005, many in the UK and elsewhere in the bloc smelt a rat. This looked like a bid to shoehorn national governments into a nascent United States of Europe. The French and the Dutch agreed: and being constitutionally guaranteed a referendum on the matter, both

Meghan Markle and the trouble with human rights law

Meghan Markle hailed her victory in a high court privacy case as a ‘comprehensive win’ over the Mail on Sunday’s ‘illegal and dehumanising practices’. But is that right? If you dig beneath the headlines and read the judge’s ruling, it becomes clear that her victory has much to do with a burgeoning expansion of privacy

The SNP may never recover from its bungled Hate Crime Bill

The SNP has, until recently, looked unassailable. But amidst the drama surrounding the Alex Salmond inquiry, could a backlash to one of the party’s headline policy proposals sink the unsinkable? Opposition to the SNP’s proposed hate speech law is clearly growing. The Holyrood government assumed that pushing through the hate speech component of its Hate Crime and

UCL’s bizarre eugenics apology

Covid aside, how should we sum up the last twelve months? The Year of the Abject Apology fits rather neatly. The past year has witnessed cringing confessions by all sorts of institutions to prior complicity in slavery, colonialism or exploitation in some form or another.  University College London is the latest institution to apologise, saying sorry because scientist and

Does Britain really need more hate crime laws?

Free speech requires a leap of faith: a belief that even if bad speech does harm, the good done by allowing people to say what they think clearly outweighs it. You either have that faith or you do not. Unfortunately it seems that the Law Commission does not, at least if a recent document it