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DSLR is a high-quality student legal journal of peer-reviewed articles, policy briefs, and professional commentaries. In this section, we aim to regularly publish blog pieces.

Blog pieces can cover any area in law, legality, current affairs, jurisprudence, justice, politics, legal issues.

Blog pieces are not tied to our call for papers and the regular publication process and can be submitted to our email account law-studentreview@dundee.ac.uk

  • The Mentally Incapable and Reasonable Foresight in the English Tort of Negligence

    2026-09-21

    6 December 2020

    By Adam Scott

    The tort of negligence is concerned with the restitution of harm that was wrongfully inflicted upon the injured party. The tort’s scope, determined by the ease with which a duty of care may be established, has varied immensely since Donoghue v Stevenson[1] ,ranging from the lenient approach of Anns[2] to the far more stringent test in Caparo Industries.[3] Regardless, the conceptual perception of negligence has remained the same – there must be wrongfully inflicted loss for liability to arise. Yet in the case of the mentally incapable, as this essay shall refer to those who would be deemed mentally unfit to stand criminal trial or who would otherwise be found of diminished responsibility for criminal liability, the tort of negligence does not account for their specific needs. Therefore, it actively discriminates against them. This essay will thus argue that the present law surrounding the tort of negligence and its interaction with the mentally incapable is wrong and indefensible, and will propose a new test which should be instituted to rectify this.

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  • “Essential” Information

    2026-09-21

    25 May 2020

    By Matthew Ogden 

    I was skyping with my family when my mother told me that one of her friends had been fined for going to the shops to buy several bottles of wine but no food. For those of you reading this in the distant future (because surely everybody at the current time has figured this out) the reason for this was because this was not considered a “basic necessity”[i] for the purposes of the coronavirus lockdown.

    This will probably not surprise many people, wine is hardly essential – although many might argue it is absolutely vital when locked in a house with your family for a long time.

    But why is it not essential?

    While this seems like a simple question, it is one both the UK and Scottish Governments have failed to answer. They have provided no guidance on what essential shopping is.[ii]

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  • Lord Sumption’s Reith Lectures

    2026-09-21

    23 January 2020 

    By Alasdair Forsyth 

    Not since the venerable Lord McCluskey in 1986 had a judge been considered such a “leading figure” in British intellectual and cultural life as to have been invited to deliver the Reith Lectures on BBC Radio—these being the criteria for selection.[i] In 2019, Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption, former Supreme Court Justice (2012-2018), was selected for the honour. This is one indication perhaps, of the prominence of judges in our time. Sumption is not as well known as previous Reith Lecturers, e.g. 2017’s Hilary Mantel or 2016’s Stephen Hawking; however, he, alongside his former colleagues on the Supreme Court, achieved some degree of fame by presiding over, in particular, the Miller[ii] case in the early stages of the process by which Britain would withdraw from the European Union.

    Sumption’s repertoire extends beyond the law. He is a Wolfson Prize-winning historian with a penchant for the Hundred Years War. Indeed, it is with a keen sense of history that he frames the arguments he lays out over his five lectures. This short post will focus on the third of these lectures, entitled “Human Rights and Wrongs”[iii] in which he argues that the British courts have usurped power via human rights law — power traditionally retained by the political process.

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  • Deep Space Mine: The Legal Challenges to Luxembourg’s Space Programme

    2026-09-21

    23 January 2020

    By Conor Keir 

    Luxembourg has long been a proud member of space faring states. The country launched its first satellite in 1988 under the Astra Geostationary Satellite Programme. However, unlike the United States or Russian Federation, the Luxembourg Space Programme has always been facilitated by private entities rather than a public authority.

    In 2016 Luxembourg announced a new programme, the aptly named Space Resources, to explore new avenues to resource exploration and exploitation in space. The programme hopes to use the resources of asteroids and other celestial bodies to aid in off-planet based ship building and refuelling. Luxembourg has created a large legal framework to allow private companies to operate and mine in space under le Luxembourg flag. These companies may make space travel both cheaper and more environmentally sustainable as spacecraft could be launched from outside the earth’s atmosphere.

    This new programme is not without its critics and legal challenges however. The two international treaties governing space, the Outer Space Treaty 1967 and the Moon Treaty 1984, both pose issues with their constituent articles.[i] These treaties have never been used to block commercial space mining before however, so it is unclear how both treaties will be applied and whether they would be effective or not.

    Read more about Deep Space Mine: The Legal Challenges to Luxembourg’s Space Programme