Welcome to our fifth newsletter. It has been a summer to remember, as BACL (formerly the UK National Committee of Comparative Law) celebrated its 75 anniversary at King’s College, Cambridge. Please see too our sections on our other activities.

We take this moment to invite all BACL reps to help us further to expand BACL’s horizons. BACL activities continue to feed discussions and publications, and we are proud to foster an inclusive and keen community of comparative law scholars. Enjoy the summer break from teaching and do keep in touch.

Dr Sirko Harder and Dr Sophie Turenne (BACL Committee)

Welcome and news from the community

With regret, we say goodbye to Dr Mary Guy (Liverpool John Moores University) as Committee Secretary but warmly welcome Dr Penny Giosa (pictured, left) as her successor, starting in September 2025. Penny is a Lecturer in EU Law at the University of Reading and has research interests in competition law and public procurement in a comparative perspective. Penny is currently Convenor of the SLS Comparative Law section.

We also say goodbye to Professor Yseult Marique as Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of the BACL blog. Under Yseult’s direction, the blog has become a lively forum of discussion, and it is no small feat to follow her steps. Dr Sirko Harder and Dr Sophie Turenne act as Interim Editors-in-Chief for the time being, and we welcome expressions of interest to join our nascent editorial team.

We also welcome as new BACL reps Professor Jacco Bomhoff (LSE); Dr Mat Campbell (Glasgow University); Professor Peter Cserne (Aberdeen University); and Dr Paulina Wilson (Queen’s University Belfast).

News from the International Academy Comparative Law

The IACL 5^th Thematic Congress took place in Paris on 15-16 November 2024, where Professor Paula Giliker (Bristol University) spoke on the Teaching of Comparative Law (Theme 3). We congratulate Professor Paula Giliker (a former BACL President) on her election as Titular Member of the IACL, which was announced at the very end of the Congress!

The next General Congress will take place in Berlin in 2026 with 18+ UK national rapporteurs writing on selected topics. We will circulate any updates that we receive.

Activities 2024-2025

• Annual Seminar 2024

BACL’s Annual Seminar took place on 3 September 2024, on the occasion of the Society of Legal Scholars’ Conference at Bristol University. It was dedicated to ‘Vulnerable consumers and the law: comparative perspectives’. The event was hybrid and attracted a solid crowd of participants to listen to the following speakers on the following topics

Professor Peter Rott (Oldenburg University), ‘Protection of low-income consumers between EU consumer law and national welfare law’

Dr Eleni Kaprou (Queen Mary University London), ‘Consumer vulnerability and the harmonisation paradigm in the EU- Insights from Greece and beyond’

Dr Jule Mulder (Bristol University), ‘The vulnerability concept from a comparative perspective – Exploring the potential intersection of consumer and non-discrimination law’

• Comparative law today: digging trenches, bridging knowledge? 75^th Anniversary BACL Workshop

As noted above, BACL’s 75th Anniversary workshop took place at King’s College. It was supported by the Centre of European Legal Studies (University of Cambridge), King’s College Cambridge, and the Society of Legal Scholars. It provided a timely opportunity to reflect on the theory and substance of comparative law, to exchange ideas and practices about teaching comparative law, and to explore the use of comparison to construct knowledge about legal systems and ideas of legal change. The speakers were:

• Dr Sophie Boyron (Birmingham University), ‘Is there be a role for ‘administrative’ mediation in common law jurisdictions?
• Professor Ngoc Son Bui (Oxford University), ‘Comparative law’s engagement with Asia’
• Ms Chen Chen (Oxford University), ‘Asymmetries in the regulation of neighbourhood land use Professor Naomi Creutzfeldt (Kent University), ‘Access to Justice in an age of digitisation – what can we gain from a comparative perspective?’
• Professor Erin Delaney (UCL), ‘Heuristic Constitutionalism’
• Professor Michele Graziadei (Turin University), ‘The not so lonely comparative lawyer’
• Dr Irini Katsirea (Sheffield University), ‘Press freedom guarantees for online news providers: comparative insights from the UK and Germany’
• Dr Dorota Leczykiewicz (Oxford University), ‘Theorising judicial law across jurisdictions’
• Professor Yseult Marique (Essex University), ‘Independent fiscal boards: a case study for new challenges for comparative law’
• Dr Colm McGrath (KCL), ‘Legal development and the decolonial turn in comparative law’
• Professor Geoffrey Samuel (Kent University), ‘Do comparatists really need to think seriously about theory and method?
• Professor Paula Giliker (Bristol University), ‘Teaching Comparative Law in the UK post-Brexit: Reflections’
• Dr Johannes Ungerer (Oxford University) (paper co-authored with Prof. Matthew Dyson), ‘Juggling authority and rationality through comparative law: normative bridging across national trenches’
• Dr Bo Wang (Sheffield University), ‘Theft, fraud and dishonesty – a comparison between English Law and Chinese Law’
• Professor Se-shauna Wheatle (Durham University), ‘Unwritten constitutional principles: lessons from the Commonwealth Caribbean’
• Dr Paulina Wilson (QUB), ‘Distilling the essence of professionalism: comparative insights into tort liability as a guide to professional regulation’

Professors John Bell (Cambridge University), Paula Giliker (Bristol University) and Mathias Siems (EUI Florence) concluded the workshop with a roundtable discussion on comparative law teaching and research in the UK post-Brexit.

Sessions were chaired by Professor Myriam Hunter-Henin (UCL), Dr Annette Nordhausen Scholes (Manchester University), Dr Catherine Pédamon (Westminster University), Professor Claudina Richards (UEA), and Professor Solène Rowan (KCL).

We are grateful to Dr Sophie Turenne for organizing this event, to Dr Sirko Harder and Zheng Hong See for their assistance, and to our various sponsors (above) for making this event possible. Heartfelt thanks go to our speakers, the chairpersons and the audience for their contributions.

• Book discussion

On 29 April 2025, BACL hosted a webinar dedicated to a discussion of Dr Irini Katsirea’s book, Press Freedom and Regulation in a Digital Era: A Comparative Study (2024).

This book examines the challenges for press freedom in the nascent digital news ecosystem. Drawing upon decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union, as well as German, UK and US case law, this comparative work explores the regulation of the press in the digital era and the impact of the proliferating media laws, policies, and jurisprudence on press freedom. It brings together two distinct strands of analysis, the concepts of press freedom and regulation, and the phenomena of convergence and digitalization.

Professor Jacob Rowbottom (University of Oxford) chaired the discussion between Dr Katsirea (University of Sheffield), Dr Peter Coe (University of Birmingham), Emeritus Professor Thomas Gibbons (University of Manchester), and Emeritus Professor Bernd Holznagel (University of Münster). This was followed by Q&A.

A recording of the webinar is available here.

• Online book launch

On 18 February 2025, Dr Mary Guy hosted a hybrid presentation by Dr Matteo Nicolini (Verona/Newcastle) on the topic ‘A Scientific State of Mind: Manufacturing the Law in a Time of Indicators’.

Since its establishment as an academic discipline, comparative law has applied markers and other mechanisms of visualisation to rank the legal systems of the world. In most cases, displayed on the world map, systems were grouped (and coloured) to reflect their membership of a given legal family (or tradition). But in recent times, comparative law has moved towards a new type of visualisation of the law, which is mainly based on indexes and indicators. Through them, legal scholars and practitioners measure legal systems against specific benchmarks; they no longer search for commonalities among legal systems but are interested in assessing how the law performs in economic terms. The presentation critically analysed this ‘quantitative turn’ in comparative law and focused on the role played by social indicators in general, and legal indicators in particular, in contemporary societies.

• Blog posts

The blog published approximately 30 contributions in the past 12 months on a wide range of topics. The contributions are a mixture of original contributions, book reviews and summaries of prominent publications. Notable blog posts include contributions following BACL’s Annual Seminar 2024 in Bristol, with pieces by Jule Mulder and Peter Rott; the online book discussion of Irini Katsirea’s Press Freedom and Regulation in a Digital Area (recording available here and blog pieces by Thomas Gibbons available here and by Peter Coe here, with a piece by Bernd Holznagel forthcoming); a blog series on judicial creativity (with pieces by Katy Barnett, Karmen Lutman, Sergio Garcia Long,  Julio-Cesar Betancourt, Marcus Galdia, Jacques du Plessis, Abhijnan Jha and Natsha Singh; and pieces by IACL members Paula Giliker, Jakko Husa, Vernon Palmer, Agustin Parise, Marie-Claire Ponthoreau, Lionel Smith, and Guillaume Tusseau.

As usual, the blog presented summaries of PhD theses recently defended where comparative law was a key feature: Willem Theus’ on ‘places in between’ and special international economic areas and Marie-Elisabeth Boggio-Monteron’s on parliamentary practices. This is therefore a reminder, and an invitation to new Drs to consider publicising their research with a blog post!

Particular thanks are due to our book reviewers, Luca Siliquini-Cinelli and Joel Colon-Rios.

Watch this space!

• Annual Seminar 2025

The 2025 Annual Seminar is dedicated to ‘Comparative Criminal Law’. It will take place in person (only) on Tuesday 2 September 2025, from 9:30 to 11:30 am on the occasion of the Society of Legal Scholars’ 116^th Conference at the University of Leeds.  The seminar will focus on English, French and Chinese criminal laws in a comparative perspective. Registration and further information is available here.

Speakers and presentations:

• Audrey Guinchard (University of Essex), ‘A Comparative Perspective on the Insanity Defence in French Law: Some Common Fault Lines?’
• Andra Le Roux-Kemp (University of Lincoln): ‘Deportation as Punishment: A Chinese Comparative and Historical Analysis of Deportation Orders in Criminal Sentencing’
• Laurene Soubise (University of Leeds), ‘Judging the Offender: French Criminal Justice Culture and the Challenges of McDonaldization’

Do register for this event here. Tea/coffee will be served from 9 am, and there will be time for a Q&A with the audience.

The BACL Committee and speakers also plan to meet informally for dinner in Leeds on Monday 1 September (time and venue tbc) and cordially invite BACL members to meet with us then. Do let the BACL Committee know via britassoccomplaw@gmail.com if you would like to come.

• 2026 PG Workshop

The 2026 PhD Workshop will take place at the University of Sussex, and we are grateful to Dr Sirko Harder for hosting it. More information will follow in early 2026.

Announcements

• Our next Annual Meeting will take place online in December 2025, date tbc.

• BACL also welcomes expressions of interests from reps to organise the PG Workshop in 2027.

• As ever, any suggestions to contribute a blog post or a blog series are gratefully received. Please email your suggestions to britassoccomplaw.blog@gmail.com.

• Please do consider following the blog by clicking here. You will then be able to follow all our events and will receive approximatively one email per week during term time about comparative law developments among a wide range of areas of the law. This is an excellent way to provide comparative law illustrations for any modules you might be teaching!

ENJOY THE SUMMER BREAK