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Following a recent high-profile case in which a regulatory, strict liability offence was utilised to provide the "unlawful act" in unlawful act manslaughter, this article examines what is a sufficiently "unlawful" act to underpin that offence. It argues that the breadth of offences that can now be used to found an unlawful act manslaughter charge has led to a departure from the fair-labelling principle and traditional notions of culpability. Even the traditional argument, that the requirement of dangerousness sufficiently circumscribes those offences that qualify, has been weakened as that requirement has been diluted, and no longer provides adequate protection. Considering the legal position when a death resulted from a collision with a bike which did not comply with a Regulation, this article argues that Hying to use unlawful act manslaughter to fill a lacuna in the law relating to fatal collisions involving cyclists risks unfairness to defendants through the unwarranted expansion of liability. New legislation is likely to be the most appropriate way properly to criminalise riding falling below the standard of a reasonable cyclist, but not amounting to gross negligence, that causes death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last year has seen a revolt against the recommendations of the Zellick Report (1994) in England and Wales, and pressure on universities worldwide to bring serious criminal conduct within their own disciplinary structures. This paper examines the reasons why the Zellick Report advised against this, and why higher-education institutions have now turned their back on a number of its recommendations. Factors including student pressure and concerns about low conviction rates for sexual offences in the criminal courts have been cited, but this paper argues that universities will struggle to create a disciplinary system that is fair to both those who are accused of such offences and those who have been victims of them. A recent Universities UK report has reversed the Zellick guidance that conduct amounting to a serious criminal offence should never be pursued under university disciplinary structures. Drawing on both authors' experiences as practitioners, and using the first author's experience of university disciplinary matters as a case-study, this paper reviews the practical problems of bringing such serious conduct under university disciplinary structures, focusing particularly on the intersection of criminal and internal disciplinary proceedings. It concludes by suggesting possible ways of ameliorating these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights three challenges arising from the interpretation of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 s.5 just over 10 years after it came into force. These are the formulation as a single offence, the reasonableness test in s.5(l)(d)(i), and the factual basis of the jury 's verdict. The author argues that these three matters may continue to compromise the section s usefulness if they are not approached with clarity by trial judges and the appellate courts. Due to the relatively scarce use of this section, it is argued that the law in relation to it has been slow to develop, and this is regrettable for a serious offence that deals with a particularly difficult element of human experience—the death of a child at the hands of someone in the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]