4th October - Law News

Edition 5395: LawNewsIndex is a UK based daily legal news archive on Law, Lawyers, Law Firms, Jurisprudence, Legislation, Litigation, Legal Ethics, Human Rights and Social Justice related issues since 2011.

Today's Highlighted Video: Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (Respondent) v Commissioners for His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (Appellant) Case ID: UKSC/2024/0048

A selection of important developments in the world of law and justice (for a comprehensive look at the news and events, please visit @theLawMap Twitter/X feed):

Saturday Conversations on Law

• Law Society supports wellbeing and pro bono charities with long-term funding | Law Gazette
• CILEX has urged the government to maintain the Access to Justice Foundation’s (AJF’s) status as the only charity entitled to undistributed damages and settlements from opt-out collective actions | New Law Journal
• Letitia James appointed special prosecutor in alleged gang-rape at Cornell. New York attorney general brought in by governor after recent questions raised over university’s 2024 investigation #US
• LawWorks, which connects people who can’t afford legal advice, and LawCare, which helps legal professionals with stress, addiction and mental health issues, are both to receive a further three years of Law Society funding | New Law Journal
• Palestine Action crowdfunder for UK supreme court challenge blocked due to US sanctions: CrowdJustice platform says US firm Stripe, its payment processor, ‘cannot support accounts or transactions’ linked to group
• An optometrist contesting a misconduct finding appealed his case because the judge heard it remotely while reclining in bed at home where he was recovering from surgery on a ruptured Achilles tendon | New Law Journal

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The Sunday Editorial: 

LawNewsIndex was founded as a way of cataloguing the ongoing changes in the UK justice system as well as documenting social justice related conversations as observed through the Twitter/X account @thelawmap. In the decade and half since 2011, LawNewsIndex has collated thousands of articles documenting how the justice system in Britain had responded to local and international events. The ongoing archive on justice, law and societal changes covers each day since December 2011. Since July 2026, a new weekend feature comprising essays, comments and original creative writing on an eclectic range of subjects is being published as The Sunday Editorial from a range of writers:  

 

The Dark Gravity of Federico García Lorca - the Poet and the Duende: There are poets whose reputations seem to diminish with familiarity, and poets whose work becomes more perplexing the longer one lives with it. Federico García Lorca belongs to the second category. His name has accumulated sediments of legend: Granada, the gypsy ballads, flamenco, the moon, the knife, the horse, the olive tree, New York in the crash of 1929, the Generation of ’27, an ambiguous sexuality, and, finally, the execution in August 1936, when Lorca was a mere thirty-eight year old. The danger of such a mythology is that it can make the poetry appear predetermined, as though the poems were merely elaborate illustrations of a tragic life. Lorca deserves something more difficult and more durable: to be read as one of the major formal innovators of twentieth-century European literature.

Lorca achievement was to discover a language in which the archaic and the modern could exist simultaneously. He was fascinated by the inherited forms of Spanish popular culture – ballad, song, Catholic ritual, Andalusian folklore, ‘cante jondo’ – but he was no antiquarian. The past in Lorca is not a museum but a living pressure to extol elements of it in the present. He set the disruptive resources of modernism and surrealism, producing poems in which traditional rhythms coexist with startlingly unfamiliar images. What looks at first like folklore is repeatedly made strange.

‘Romancero Gitano’ published in 1928 is the obvious example. Its title suggests a collection of traditional ballads, yet the poems continually frustrate the expectations of the form. Lorca borrows the romance's narrative economy and its atmosphere of oral transmission, but subjects them to a modern symbolic imagination. The gypsy of these poems is not simply a sociological figure or an emblem of picturesque Andalusia. The collection turns the figure into a site of conflict: between freedom and authority, erotic desire and repression, the individual and the collective, life and death.

This is one reason Lorca's poetry has proved so resistant to paraphrase. His images do not behave like illustrations of ideas. They generate meanings by collision. The moon is at once erotic, fatal and theatrical; water may suggest renewal or disappearance; blood can signify kinship, violence, sexuality and sacrifice. A knife is both an object and an event waiting to happen. Such imagery is not merely decorative. Lorca gives objects a kind of dramatic agency. They enter the poem already carrying the possibility of transformation.

The distinction matters because Lorca is often reduced to the “poet of beautiful images”. Beauty is certainly present, sometimes almost oppressively so, but his poetry is rarely comfortable. Beneath its colour and musicality lies an obsession with obstruction: the thwarted lover, the woman confined by marriage, the child confronted by death, the outsider who cannot enter the social order. Desire in Lorca is seldom uncomplicatedly celebratory. It is desire under surveillance.

Lorca’s theatre makes this social dimension unmistakable. ‘Blood Wedding’, ‘Yerma’ and ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ are often grouped together as rural tragedies, but “rural” can obscure their intellectual sophistication. Their villages are miniature political systems. Honour, sexual propriety, class, gender and reputation determine the permissible boundaries of individual life. What makes the plays so powerful is that repression is rarely represented as the action of a single villain. It is distributed throughout the community. The characters police themselves and one another because the social order has become internalised.

In ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’, for example, Bernarda's authoritarianism is inseparable from her terror of social judgement. Her daughters do not merely live under one woman's tyranny; they inhabit a world in which female sexuality is regulated by gossip, marriage and family honour. The house consequently becomes more than a setting. It is a mechanism. Its walls produce the tragedy.

Lorca's own sexuality inevitably complicates these readings, though it should not become a master key. He lived at a time when homosexuality in Spain could not be treated as an uncomplicated public identity, and his writing repeatedly returns to forms of desire that cannot be accommodated by convention. Yet to read every image of confinement as a coded autobiographical confession would be to make the poetry smaller than it is. Lorca's subject is not homosexuality alone but the broader human catastrophe produced when desire encounters an intolerant social order.

This helps explain the importance of his visit to New York in 1929–30. ‘Poet in New York’ is sometimes treated as an abrupt departure from the Andalusian Lorca, but the continuity is deeper than the difference in scenery suggests. The city simply provides a new machinery of repression. The moonlit villages of the earlier poems give way to skyscrapers, crowds, banks, factories and slaughterhouses. Nature has not disappeared so much as been overwhelmed.

The poems are among the most unsettling responses to modernity in European literature. Lorca's New York is not the rational city of progress but a delirious organism in which capitalism, technology and mass society have distorted human relations. The famous surreal images – animals, machinery, mutilated bodies, sterile landscapes – are not surrealist ornament for its own sake. They express a world in which ordinary language appears inadequate to the scale of alienation.

It is here that Lorca's international importance becomes apparent. He was not simply a Spanish poet writing about Spain. His confrontation with New York demonstrates his capacity to make the local strange and the foreign intimate. He could absorb an unfamiliar metropolis into an imaginative vocabulary formed in Andalusia. The result is neither travel writing nor cultural criticism, but a poetry of dislocation.

Read last week's Editorial 

Taz Rahman holds a masters in ethics and social philosophy from Cardiff University. He is a South Wales based writer and literary documentary maker. His debut poetry collection 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' was published by Seren Books and longlisted for the Laurel prize in 2024. He is widely published in leading poetry magazines and anthologies and had founded Wales' first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet. 

 

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