Self-represented litigants in England and Wales, as well as many other countries, form a large heterogeneous proportion of the population. In contrast, the justice system provides for the whole population a standard platform that cannot accommodate the variability in education, ability, personal characteristics and circumstances. In addition, there are high barriers to access, including high costs, excessive formalities and unclear interpretation of the law. These barriers are prevalent even in venues of justice designed to be public friendly. To provide justice for all, the legal system needs to assimilate latest scientific findings on individual differences and minimise barriers to access.

The environmental impact assessment (EIA) regime has become the standard procedure for implementing the public participation concept based on Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration on Environment adopted at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, as a strategy for preventing environmental harm. Even though this paper accepts the basic premise of the concept of public participation and its acclaimed virtues, it is argued that the EIA regime is an unreliable procedure for implementing the concept in developing markets. This is because of the fundamentality of access to justice to effective participation. The weak and inefficient justice systems in developing markets is unlikely to be able to effectively support the EIA process to ensure effective and meaningful participation of the public or the potential victims of environmental harm. Since meaningful participation of the public and interest groups in the process is the major driver of the public participation concept, the paper concludes that participation at a more fundamental level of corporate decision-making will be more appropriate for developing markets to obviate the need to rely on their weak and inefficient judicial systems.

Few unmarried couples enter into express agreements regarding what should happen to property if their relationship ends. The law has developed in different directions in the past fifty years as courts try to find an appropriate test to apply to cohabitation relationship breakdown. As cohabitation becomes more common, the need for a more flexible approach has become pressing. The application of the common intention constructive trust to family home disputes remains unsettled and far from satisfactory, particularly for women playing the role of a housewife or a mother, often non-legal owners of the property with little legal sympathy to their non-financial contributions to the property. Children are also victims in the sale of family home under Section 15 of TOLATA 1996. The potential consequences could tip the scale to the interests of creditors; and the unpredictability and inappropriate balance between co-owners’ life and interests of creditors will bring about either human right challenges on the rights to private and family life of involved wife and children, or commercial and financial repercussions on creditors to absorb the adverse effects of court rulings on their interests.

Section 26 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, as amended in 2013, provides for the protection of children from child marriage. A lack of understanding of the meaning and implications of this statutory provision has widely been regarded as limiting its significance and effectiveness in child protection work. Therefore, this study employs legal hermeneutics to analyse the statute’s legal and practical implications and highlights key insights for child protection interventions by Zimbabwean practitioners, particularly in relation to protecting children from child marriage, including the prosecution of perpetrators and child rights advocacy.

This Comment examines the commercial court decision of Navalmar UK Ltd v Kale Maden Hammaddeler Sanayi VE Ticart AS (THE MV Arundel Castle) [2017] EWHC 116; [2017] 1 Lloyd’s Rep 370. [Comm.] as to the issue of when a vessel can be considered an arrived ship under a port charter in shipping law.

The debate surrounding climate change has focused on many disciplines, including scientific, economic, and political perspectives. There is a growing discourse that is gaining traction within legal academia, connecting these disciplines to the principles of international law. *The Research Handbook on Climate and Trade Law* identifies the need for stronger environmental laws through existing treaties and organisations and provides a clear outline of how this might be achieved. Climate change must first be understood as negatively affecting the entire world and, secondly, as being caused largely by human activity. The evolution of global environmental changes has had, and will continue to have, potentially catastrophic consequences; this Handbook scrutinises the issue through the lens of law and invites a long-overdue discussion. The Handbook efficiently begins by detailing how human consumption and production have developed through periods of industrialisation, spurred by social greed and the growing demands arising from economic inequality (1). There is an underlying truth with which one must agree in order to understand the premise of the Handbook: the consumption of wealthier nations and the disproportionate ownership of the world’s wealth by an identifiable few have fuelled the changes we see in relation to consumption and production. The beginning chapters of Part I introduce current facts and developments regarding climate change, referencing several agreements and accords. The authors state that the book attempts to fill a gap in the literature on climate law by discussing pressing questions concerning climate change and trade (10). The author claims that these effects need to be addressed for any further discussion to occur (4). Past and present climate change treaties have seemingly fluctuated in their success in addressing both trade and environmental laws and policies. For example, the Kyoto Protocol (5) is heavily discussed and referenced throughout the Handbook. Indeed, this provides an important starting point for international discussions on environmental policy and trade law. The Protocol might be argued to have failed to create a unified solution, while nevertheless succeeding in putting forward the notion that “climate change is a more than delicate issue in which the solution/outcomes will vary depending upon the nation...there’s no homogenous solution as the term climate change itself needs to be reassessed per the status of the nation - developed/developing” (5). Interpretations regarding climate change, which was initially treated as a general topic of discussion, suddenly became a global issue as the international community could not establish a unified definition of the term. Even among developed nations, particularly the United States, a global leader and major power, which was the largest emitter of GHGs during the Obama presidency, there was significant political opposition when the administration proposed a 32% reduction in GHG emissions by 2030; the proposal was rejected by more than half of the US population (1). A government cannot continue with efforts to address climate change if the opposition is in a position of majority.