The Empty City - a law and polity blog

This is a topic this blog has addressed before, but the issue never goes away and so the same old points bear repeating. Law is not magic. Prohibitions are not spells. When you make a law against a thing, that thing may not instantly vanish. It is not as if one points a wand and says something in cod-Latin, and the unwanted thing is thereby extinguished.

There was recently an international arbitration award: a lucky arbitration award. The lucky winner was the United Kingdom, the unlucky loser was Rwanda. The dispute was about that relocation scheme for asylum seekers which the then-government of the United Kingdom sought to put in place before it was defeated at the last general election. Over at Prospect (click here) I have done a piece on that scheme and how this arbitration ward finally brings the scheme to an end.

The proposal for a ‘anti-weaponisation’ fund seems to have been dumped. The acting Attorney General of the United States said at Congressional meeting yesterday that: “We are not moving forward with the fund.” Nor indeed moving in any direction with the fund. * But the fund was a consequence of a more fundamental abuse of power which is still in place, and until that is hacked out there will be other problems.

In a significant development the court has now re-opened the litigation which had ended in the supposed ‘settlement’ of a slush fund for President Trump’s political supporters. You may recall that this blog has previously covered this extraordinary case.

The autonomy and agency of an actor taking on a major media company and winning Today is the centenary of the birth of Marilyn Monroe, and over at Prospect I have an article on how Marilyn Monroe took on Twentieth Century and won. Below I set out the story with more context and more detail. * The Empty City - a law and polity blog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

How two cases show how a problem can be attacked in two different ways This newsletter (as these blogs are now called it seems) has previously covered the extraordinary legal suit brought by Donald Trump against his own government and then the extraordinary supposed “settlement” of that law suit.

In which a settlement agreement is pushed far beyond any proper legal limits Contract law is a fascinating subject: it is about how parties can create legal obligations and rights between themselves which otherwise would not exist. Constitutional and other forms of public law are, of course also fascinating: for they set out what can and cannot be done by those charged with public power. And when contract law and constitutional law mix, then the results are even more fascinating.

This was a week when we got to consider the office of Prime Minister, again. The current occupant has somehow, through a sequence of decisions and non-decisions, made themselves a lame duck - despite a thumping majority two years ago and three years of a parliamentary terms to go. It is quite an impressive under-achievement, given the powers and privileges a Prime Minister has at their disposal. But for a Prime Minister to be on their way out is, as this blog has stated before, not unusual.

There is perhaps a ‘classic’ view - which like many ‘classic’ views is not really true - that a Prime Minister comes in with a general election and then goes out at a General Election. Like Disraeli and Gladstone did in Victorian days, or Attlee did between 1945 and 1951. But since 1974 that has not happened. Every Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 1974 has either taken office between general elections or lost office between general elections - and recently even both.

As there are elections over Great Britain tomorrow, this blog goes from the local to the far-away: in particular to the Chagos Islands, otherwise known as the British Indian Ocean Territory. The Chagos Islands are an index of actual British international influence - because things keep on being decided about them without it mattering what the United Kingdom government itself wants, even though we are the nominal controlling power.