This REF has been utterly chaotic and even more dispiriting than usual. I still think that if did magically disappear from academic life VCs up and down the country would double teaching hours in a heartbeat...

Can we bring back the era when saying this shit would get you ostracized for life. For all the cancelling supposedly about, rich auld fellas still feel pretty free and easy about dropping their invective... share.google/HPDFEvyxD5v4...

Only in NI could some folk could be just this sniffy about the news that the Treasury is to give Stormont £400m to balance budget because it might look like a win for Sinn Féin. Very much "I'd rather see public services collapse than John O'Dowd get credit". share.google/cid6NhkAgJ1S...

The law on universities and free speech prevents speakers from being *disinvited after they have been invited*. It does not require universities to provide a platform to whoever demands one. Let's not mince words: the threat to cut funding to every university who disagrees with them is fascist.

At least it didn't happen to some poor barrister, and makes me feel better for the surge of panic when I've not silenced my phone before lecture my starts. Could have been topped had Lord Briggs been in the middle of If Books Could Kill... share.google/hqMTTG8uv35P...

The Week in Westminster featured Bernard Jenkin countering about the good Mandelson did with regard to Northern Ireland now being overshadowed. This is a much more accurate appraisal - Mandelson did no heavy lifting as NI Secretary, he just resented Mowlam's success: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKIJ...

Tomorrow's Headlines The Telegraph: Starmer Next! The Guardian: Morgan McSweeney's Gone, Thank God! The Irish Times: Irishman forced out of UK Labour Role The Irish (Cork) Examiner: Having Completed Michael Collins' Work, and brought low the British Government, Macroom Calls it's Son Home

Grade inflation, insofar as it exists, has no clear connection to widening access. If wider access had taken place in isolation, grades would have dropped. Instead the marketisation of HE, with the removal of recruitment quotas, is the major issue. But the Telegraph cheered that on, so we get this:

#BBCNews - Nigerian court orders UK to pay £420m over 1949 killing of miners www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

'In written submissions, al-Libi's barristers said the government had "proceeded to enter her chambers despite having been refused permission, enter her safe in her absence, and remove the very working material over which consent had been expressly refused, in both electronic and paper form".'

I think the problem with this approach is the power of US money rapidly makes them the only ideological show in town on the right, and then regardless of domestic opposition to MAGA, you are one bad economic run from them getting power.

Every Western country is currently doing it's own version of the Epstein files, which both attests to and obscures Epstein's reach and the scale of the scandal. A key example is Thorbjørn Jagland - who headed up the Council of Europe amid the "prisoner voting" years: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Public service email to everyone heading into the UK at the end of this month who isn't a UK or Irish citizen. The ETA requirement for UK entry is coming and isn't receiving enough advanced coverage. Don't get caught in the ensuing chaos: homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/electronic-t...

The current Irish Govt spends a hell of a lot of time casting around for a narrative to explain its failures (here to invest in flood defences). If judicial reviews are succeeding, it's because things are going wrong with their decision making processes: www.thejournal.ie/jack-chamber...

Struck by how, just a week ago, the UK Parliament was still being urged by Lord Alton, Chair of the JCHR, to summon up the spirit of George Mitchell in addressing the legacy of the NI Conflict. So much "great man" peace making. All changed, changed utterly. committees.parliament.uk/event/26304/...

Well he told us the bridge was for sale? What reason had we not to just take his words at face value? Probe a bit? No, that's what smart suited lawyers and the like do... No reader, a "we accepted the answers given" line will only dame this crew more.

A prayer for dark days: Grant me, faced with such trolling, that I should be able to conjure up a fraction of Catherine Connolly's grace.

NEW: Police in Northern Ireland will curb sharing data on migrant victims of crime with UK immigration enforcement, after admitting that routine sharing “could be perceived as constituting institutional racism”.

It isn't possible to judge a series before it comes out, but this new BBC series is making a major (and v hard to justify) editorial decision from it's very title. Israel is accorded the status of a state in that title, whereas even though it is recognised by the UK, Palestine is not... Why?

The new releases undermine Mitchell's account that he had no contact with Epstein after his conviction in 2008. That's enough. But everything's good when Bertie is your character reference... www.thejournal.ie/bertie-ahern...

New report out today on the impact of the Supreme Court's s.28(7) jurisprudence, with @profnicolamcewen.bsky.social, @chrismccork.bsky.social and Jo Hunt. www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/...

Mike Gordon: The Mandelson Scandal and the Prime Minister: Investigating a Breach of the Ministerial Code ukconstitutionallaw.org/2026/02/05/m...

From 2000 the New Labour govt took asylum seekers off mainstream benefits & instigated a Home Office-run scheme of “dispersing” them round the UK, often to places with limited services and often moving them frequently & at short notice. Costly & badly organised travel was an inevitable consequence

The Economist's Bagehot column captures how awful the Epstein disclosures are, but also how much of this was dogs-on-the-street level known. And ministers looked right past it until it was there in their face and couldn't eye roll "morals are for little people" any more... econ.st/3NZFam4

Such an important illustration of the role of the jury in the criminal justice process, but worth remembering that all of the prosecutions coming down the line under s13 TA 2000 after the banning of Palestine Action involve a summary offence tried before magistrates: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Join us on 11 Feb, 13:00 to hear from Conall Mallory, QUB, on "Lawfare, Accountability and the Conservative Governments of 2010-2024". You can register and find out about all upcoming research events at NLS here: www.ncl.ac.uk/law/events/

The whole "pulling the levers of power does nothing" line that Starmer trots out masks the fact that too often Westminster politicians aren't clear of the powers they have and get surprised when they find that certain issues are devolved, and not everyone buys their bad ideas:

Devastatingly sad. Every Labour MP should be forced to read this. In fact, every MP, who rushed back to Parliament to vote to save one steel mill, whilst hastening the collapse of dozens of universities - and harming the students, staff, communities and economies universities sustain and support

Spectacularly misses the point that unilateral government action to freeze the level at which repayment starts means that students are facing repayments quantatively different from those they signed up to, but never let the facts get in the way of a Telegraph rant about "low quality degrees":

Same approach to collective worship, doubling down on opt outs with some world religion window dressing for RE as a subject. Paul Givan is fighting a rearguard action to change as little as possible in response to the UKSC decision in JR87, and to take a long time doing it: search.app/Csqkz

This is pages 49-50 of The Great University Gamble - written in 2012, published 2013.

Today in "Everything has gone to shit, but mostly academic publishing". Universities spent eye watering sums on ebook deals for core texts. But the publisher web platforms make it v difficult to provide tailored reading. Here's one of my core texts, which lists all front matter as pages:

If folk are in London this Friday evening, LSE Law School are holding what is certain to be an emotional event paying tribute to their colleague, the much missed Professor Conor Gearty: share.google/RuVaqGkk7Zd4...

The “problem” is that a peerage is BOTH an honour AND confers a role/function (membership of the HL). There are mechanisms for removing the latter but not the former. And in that respect a peerage differs from other honours (eg knighthood) which can be removed by the prerogative without legislation

This is such an important point - a single question is such a limited opportunity. If you've ever seen a minister on the ropes from back bench questions in Parliament it's probably because of three or four MPs working in concert, with questions building on each other:

There’s maybe a few thousand trans kids in the Republic of Ireland, but each week Irish papers pay a bunch of columnists who dedicate a large part of their writing trying to make these kids lives absolutely miserable.

An Imbolc treat for #standingstonesunday, the Giant's Ring, a stone's throw from Belfast, and all but deserted even on a day that really did feel like Spring...

It's because The Telegraph is passionately anti imperialist that it demands that the UK holds on to it's BIOT colony. I've a bridge for sale for anyone who buys this muck...

I'm all for a deeper engagement with what the UK does after Brexit, but I really struggle with any account that starts from this as its account of the state. Forgetting that NI exists was the root of so many Brexit failings, and this does it again. For as long as NI exists, the UK is tied to the EU.

Despite a nominal ceasefire, Israel has carried out some of its deadliest airstrikes on Gaza in months, killing at least 30 Palestinians, some of whom were sheltering in tent cities for displaced people www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

The stupidest timeline

For the anniversary that's in it, give a watch to @maireadenright.bsky.social's powerful Current Legal Problems lecture on the gaps and silences which become baked into public inquiries including (indeed, prominent in) Mark Saville's Bloody Sunday Inquiry: www.youtube.com/live/U0n39Zb...

This is a useful dissection of how Goodwin emerged, but the irony is how he attained such prominence given the supposed left biases of academia. The reality is that the academic impact agenda gives a huge career lift to someone who can sell their "policy relevance" (too often pandering) to unis:

✊ We strongly welcome the Scottish Human Rights Commission's (SHRC) call for reparations for Scotland's Nawken (Gypsy/Travellers) community, whose people were subjected to decades ongoing harm under policies known as the ‘Tinker Experiment’, including forced assimilation and child removal. (1/3)

Rachel Reeves: "It is not right that people who don't go to university bear the cost for others to." I don't use local leisure centres and I don't drive, so will I be made exempt for taxation that pays for all that stuff? Or is it only education we'll be going after

I cannot tell you how much doubt was consistently directed at the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers and how much pressure was put on news organizations to couch those numbers as unreliable. Biden himself said they were fabricated! www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

"how can we frame the drop in the murder rate as a bad thing?"

The response on standing in the Hampstead Ponds case is going to matter a lot in the cases to come - the courts want to deal with genuine parties with sufficient interest. A lot of judges are clearly tired of being part of a range of pressure groups' publicity strategies...

Starmer, as an advocate and human rights expert, makes an argument that elements of human rights law apply to military operations in Iraq. The European Court of Human Rights accepts this position. On what planet should he have to apologise for getting the law right? share.google/C1FgASdWLh41...