🔊 “adversaries have recognised the cheapest way to destabilise democracies is now not to breach our borders with tanks... the cheapest way is... through these wedge issues"
Dr Kate Ferguson at this week's event on the perceptions, drivers & consequences of the UK's culture wars
🧵⬇️ Full video below
Looking forward to hosting the VCLG hybrid at Aberdeen next week. You can contact me if you're intending to come in person, and if not I look forward to seeing you online!
I wouldn’t put it past our political class to draw the conclusion that, in the absence of an economy that creates graduate jobs, we will just have to cut back on graduates.
2 lecturer posts have been advertised today, at the University of Aberdeen, for criminal law and criminal justice. Come and join a great law school, and a subject area that seeks to be a strong part of the school's profile! Happy to discuss with anyone interested!
www.abdn.ac.uk/jobs/vacanci...
Join us tomorrow for a discussion of Gülce Ecem Uçar's paper, "The Digital Unperson: The Materiality of Nothingness and the Myth of Innocence in the New Oceania", at 3pm UK time. We hope to see you online!
Our 5th seminar is coming 🔜
🗣️ Federico La Vattiata: ‘Comparative Approaches to Normative Causation and the Limits of the But-For Test: Between Objective Attribution and Proximate Causation’.
🗓️ Wed 25 Feb, 15-16:30
📍Online & @universityofleeds.bsky.social
®️To join us: sites.google.com/view/yclf/
New VCLG series coming up! Looking forward to the online discussions, and hope to see lots of you there!
Missing from the coverage of redundancies at Edinburgh: this was done in such a haphazard, uncoordinated way, there are now core teams who have gone from 5 people to 1 with no change in workload or pressure and huge loss in knowledge of institutional process. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2576321...
Please re-share this - there aren't many permanent law jobs available in the UK right now! #academicjobfairy
I’ve missed this. I’ve missed us.
The only positive thing that’s come out of this horrifying “review” is that the responses feel like old academic Twitter, which I am happy to now see on BlueSky. Like James, I couldn’t get past the first footnote, and every snapshot I’ve seen makes this one of the worst things I’ve ever read.
This is today! Come and join us at 3pm, we look forward to discussing!
Next week, Wednesday 10 December, we will discuss the recent Scots Law decisions - Daly v HM Advocate and Keir v HM Advocate - which change the position on the admissibility of sexual history and character evidence. We hope to see you then!
🔴 NEW: The University of Edinburgh has quietly paid more than £750,000 to a controversial consulting firm amid job cuts - staff say bosses ignored "repeated" questions about its role.
Read more about 'Nousferatu' 👉 www.theferret.scot/p...
Join us thus Wednesday at 3pm, to discuss Ellens Nowell’s paper “Narratives of Criminal Justice and Sexual History Evidence Rules”. Link for seminar has been sent out this morning to our mailing list. We hope to see you then!
Of all the things we could copy from Denmark, we choose this?????????
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
This was tonnes of fun and I loved talking to everyone who came to the event. Thanks for inviting me! 😁
📣Join us today for the first #YCLF 2025-26 Seminar, we'll discuss @drfassnidge.bsky.social's paper 'The Deliberative Stage of Criminalisation and Political Turn: Theories of Criminalisation'
📅 Today, 3-4:30 pm online & @sheffielduni.bsky.social
To attend, visit sites.google.com/view/yclf/
We’re delighted to share the details of this Workshop in Legal Epistemology, co-organised by Tsampika Taralli (UoE) and Alex Houghton (Stirling). The event will take place at the University of Stirling on Oct 27th, 2-7 pm. Further info & a registration link at: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/workshop-o....
Yay. Priceless. The right column at the right time. And a gleefully English two fingers to the haters.
Just when one thinks things can’t get much worse and something’s got to give, we get things like this…
Very much looking forward to this, and to getting a chance to discuss with colleagues in the YCLF. Should be a blast!
Please help me get the word out about the new websites for Legal Theory Blog and the Legal Theory Lexicon. Reposting here and on other social media sites is great. It would be especially helpful if law school faculty members could send an email to their colleagues with the new addresses.
Migrants already "earn the right to settlement" through extortionate visa costs, which can run into tens of thousands of pounds. They prop up key services, including through the Immigration Health Surcharge.
Pushing the hostile environment on steroids helps no-one.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
A monk is seated, working on a manuscript. He is writing in a book and the writing appears to be horizontal lines.
The quickest way to finish an article is to start it. It also helps if you can stay away from social media, tv and the internet. And your cell phone. And other people. You should also fight urges to clean and organise spaces, and to cook big meals.
In other words, it’s difficult to finish articles.
An in memoriam piece by @fionaleverick.bsky.social and me for the incomparable Sir Gerald Gordon, who died last week at the age of 96: www.uofgschooloflaw.co.uk/blog/2025/9/...
More hiring at Surrey Law School! Open-area Lecturer position (Research & Teaching) - deadline Thu 2 October 2025. THE POSITION IS GENUINELY OPEN re: research focus, so all interested parties should apply.
Please circulate to anyone you think might be interested!
jobs.surrey.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...
This is a great piece (and if you are staff or a student at a British university, you might find you can log in to the FT through shibboleth etc…)
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
With Matt Dyson (Oxford), Rachel Tolley (Cambridge), & Paul Jarvis (Criminal Bar Association), I will host the next Assize Seminar in Criminal Law at UCL Laws on 7 Nov. Speakers include: @jonathanherring.bsky.social, Jessica Corsi, Findlay Stark. Info + (free) tickets: www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/...
