Virtual Issues

We are delighted to offer a selection of Virtual Issues containing curated content from eighty years of the Modern Law Review. These represent some of the key contributions from leading authors published by the Review.

MLRV05: Brexit and Withdrawal from the European Union

Since the UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the Modern Law Review has endeavoured to provide commentary on the fundamental legal issues which have subsequently been generated, from the debate about whether the executive had the power, without Parliamentary approval, to trigger the formal withdrawal process pursuant to Article 50 TEU, to analysis of R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European, to, most recently, the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. As we approach the withdrawal date, March 29, 2019, in this virtual issue of the MLR on Brexit and Withdrawal from the European Union, we collate this scholarship and provide free access to all of these articles.

We encourage our readers to consider writing a comment or response on any of these articles and to submit it to the MLR Forum section, which is designed to generate further debate about the articles we publish in the MLR.


MLRV04: In Honour of Professor Simon Roberts

In honour of Professor Simon Roberts, who sadly died in 2014, the MLR Committee is publishing a special issue on alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and legal pluralism, two core areas of Simon’s scholarship. This special issue contains three articles by Simon. Two of these articles are on ADR and the third is his 2005 Chorley lecture on legal pluralism. These articles are followed by a further seven MLR articles which are influenced by and relate to Simon’s work in these areas. This selection includes the 20th and the 35th Chorley lectures by Professors Galanter and Koskenniemi respectively. This range of articles, published between 1983 and 2007, demonstrates the scale and impact of Simon’s work. In putting together this special issue, we have made our selection from articles published in the MLR. We have also included Simon’s obituary.


MLRV03: Labour Law

The Editorial at the beginning of the first issue of The Modern Law Review in 1937 made it abundantly clear that topics such as labour law (or industrial law as it was then known) would be a central concern of the MLR. ‘The REVIEW deals with the law as it functions in society …[including] those branches of scientific study in which law is an important but not the only factor [such as] the problem of how far the mass of industrial legislation actually affects the lives of the industrial population whose social and economic condition it is intended to protect. A founding member of the editorial committee was Otto Kahn-Freund, who in many respects also founded the modern study of labour law in the United Kingdom. Previously a labour law judge in the Weimar republic, he fled Germany in response to persecution by the Nazis after his judgment regarding claims for unfair dismissal in the ‘radio case’. Our virtual issue opens with the first English translation of that pivotal judgment in the Berlin labour court in 1933, followed by an expert commentary provided by Professor Mückenberger. That judgment turned out to be a historical turning point, because following that judgment Kahn-Freund was effectively dismissed. He came to London and retrained in the common at the London School of Economics. As a young lecturer, Kahn-Freund introduced the modern contextual approach to the study of labour law and nurtured its development in the pages of The Modern Law Review. The following selection of articles that have appeared in the Review is a representative sample of that legacy.


MLRV02: International Legal Scholarship

We are pleased to offer a selection of articles published in The Modern Law Review on International Legal Scholarship. These articles are all freely available for you to read.


MLRV01: Legal Scholarship

A complete set of back issues of The Modern Law Review pre-1997 is now freely available on our website. To celebrate this welcome development we offer here a collection of some of the significant articles that have published in the MLR on legal scholarship. In a sense, every piece published in the journal is about legal scholarship, but the articles collected here are some of the best examples of where scholars have reflected on the topic explicitly and in an overarching and critical way.

There are also two possible and not inconsistent ways at looking at the value of collecting these articles together. One is to see these pieces as geological substrata in which ideas have become fossilized. Reading through such issues thus provides insight into the linear evolutionary progression of legal scholarship. A second way to understand the value of these articles is to start with the assumption that legal scholarship is constantly struggling with the same set of intellectual challenges and thus these articles provide a valuable resource in thinking about current issues. Thus the purposes of the Journal set out in the original circular for The Modern Law Review are just as important now as they were then.

Overall, what this selection makes clear is that having these back issues on line is a very real scholarly resource. It is hoped that this virtual issue will be the first of many that will make clear what Glasser noted in 1987: the Review ‘has contained an extraordinary range of material, maintaining the very highest critical standards’.


The Review

For current and past issues of the review:

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