5th July - Law News

Edition 5304 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: R (on the application of Bano) (Appellant) v London Borough of Waltham Forest (Respondent) Case ID: UKSC/2025/0050 

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

• Public family law cases are taking two weeks less to complete than they did last year, according to the family court statistics quarterly: January to March 2026, published last week | New Law Journal
• What rights is the government proposing for co-habiting couples?
• FCA car finance scheme suspended and thrown into doubt as dates given for legal challenge from law firm and lenders | Law Gazette
• The Sentencing Council is making a series of amendments to its guidelines for the magistrates’ courts and Crown Court | New Law Journal
• Hundreds join global support group for survivors of drug-facilitated rape. Zoe Watts and Amanda Stanhope launched network after being repeatedly assaulted by partners while unconscious
• Businesses are operating in an increasingly volatile environment due to technology, geopolitical and regulatory threats, according to Clyde & Co’s annual corporate risk radar survey | New Law Journal

 

 Sunday Op-Ed: 

LawNewsIndex was founded in 2011 as a way of cataloguing the ongoing changes in the UK justice system and as well as documenting social justice related conversations as observed through the Twitter/X account @thelawmap. In the proceeding decade and half LawNewsIndex collated thousands of articles documenting the ebbs and flows of time and how British society and the world beyond responded to local and national events. This present archive on justice, law and societal changes covers each and every day of the last 5304 days since December 2011. If the first fourteen years of LawNewsIndex organically generated 1 million hits from across the English speaking world, the fifteenth year saw a dramatic increase in readership and the daily blogs are being read by 60,000 to 160,000 per month with June 2026 readership at 150k and the last twelve month receiving a total of 1.05 million hits. To reflect the new eclectic readership, starting in July 2026 a weekend editorial op-ed column shall be featured each Sunday as part of LawNewsIndex with contributions from writers, thinkers, artists, grassroots community organisers as well as those with a connection to the wider world of social justice.

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Our age is reactionary. We are palpably polarised. So we are led to believe. Perhaps there is some truth in this. Those who have formed any opinion shall always find those who have formed the opposite. However, it is my belief that the temptation to vent our feelings through permanently connected electronic devices project a more quarrelsome world. Opinions expressed in the virtual world from the safety of our keyboards lack the consideration most of us reserve for each other in physical debates across a table at a café or a pub.

Folklore, ancient poetry and even graffiti left by Roman soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall attest angst and differences of opinions among our ancestors. If culture is the totality of all human expressions, our differences are important in shaping individual identities. It provides the necessary space for us to reflect on who we are in relation to who we aren’t. Differences are all the more important because the problems we face in this age such as the scarcity of resources and the impact of man-made climate change require all the accumulated wisdom of generations in alliance with scientific knowledge to leave a world fit for those who shall come after us.

If life is a journey to celebrate timeless moments, there is always whether it should be about mere survival or whether each one of us are guaranteed the same opportunity to be the best version of our selves regardless of where we were born. Mere survival may have been the lot of some of our ancestors, but we should be offered the opportunity to thrive given the age we live in.

That very question also follows the kind of society we wish to live in that ought to guarantee the absolute basic human rights. These are generally accepted to be the right to life, freedom from slavery and torture, the right to liberty and security, the right to equality and the right to a fair trial. Across the western world we are witnessing a lurch to authoritarianism and governments who are not shy to limit these basic human rights to suit their own agenda. If the lesson from past conflicts teach us anything it is that conflicts never really go away. They are cyclical and must be resolved one way or other. We must look at the 20^th century with its history of war and genocides and learn ways of avoiding repeats. We must educate our friends and neighbours to resist the lurch to populist right-wing authoritarianism. We must add our voice against the forces that say refugees are not welcome, minorities are responsible for the problems caused by irresponsible billionaires, who we love is a debate and the inequality of opportunity based on birth, skin colour and economic station in life. The true believer in human decency must express solidarity with the downtrodden.  

In declaring ‘history is a pattern of timeless moments’, T S Eliot also concluded that we eventually return to where we had originally started. However, this cyclical nature of all our journeys should not dissuade us from making it a pleasant one for ourselves and those who we share it with.

 

Taz Rahman is a Cardiff based poet, editor 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 founded Wales' first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet. 

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If you would like to make a donation to support the upkeep of LawNewsIndex please email - thelawmap@gmail.com 

 

LawnewsIndex readership in numbers: 

~ June 2026: 154,832 ~

   ~  April 2026 to end of June 2026: 408k ~ 

~ 12 months from July 2025 to end of June 2026: 1.05 million