Edinburgh Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series - October 2025
Mon 20 October 2025
The latest in the Legal Studies Research Paper Series (Vol. 13, No. 3: October, 2025) from Edinburgh Law School is now available.
View the full Edinburgh Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series on SSRN
Reforming the Public and Private Law of the Tenement
Daniel James Carr, University of Edinburgh Law School
Simon Halliday, University of Strathclyde - School of Law
This article critically examines the law of the tenement in Scotland, encompassing both its private and public law dimensions. Traditionally regarded as a domain of private law focused on individual owners’ property interests, the law, through statutory intervention, has evolved significantly over a long period of time, augmenting the role of local authorities, granting them powers to promote the public good of safe and well-maintained buildings. We argue that effective legal analysis and reform must address both private and public law perspectives in tandem. Yet, our review identifies three core challenges. First, divergent presumptions about the temporal and spatial scale of legal intervention—short-term and individualistic versus long-term and collective—complicate the legal framework. Second, the law exhibits tensions between formal and substantive approaches, reflecting differing rationalities about its operational character. Third, significant empirical gaps exist in understanding how key actors, both public and private, interact with the law, which undermines informed reform efforts. Through a detailed review of the private law reforms under the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004 Act and the statutory powers of local authorities, we identify complexities and overlapping regimes that pose challenges for effective implementation. We conclude by advocating for further empirical research to guide future policy development.
Beyond International Human Rights: Islamic Feminism as Alternative Rights Praxis
Nora Jaber, University of Edinburgh Law School
This article examines Islamic Feminism (IF) as an example of an alternative rights framework that falls beyond international human rights law (IHRL) in terms of its epistemic and conceptual grounding of rights. Specifically, it focuses on IF as it is engaged by Saudi women’s rights activists in their petitions against the ban on women driving. The article shows that while the engagement with IF does disrupt IHRL’s claim to universality as a framework for justice, its deployment as part of a struggle for juridical rights limits its liberatory potential. Through showing how both IF and IHRL produce and preclude particular subjects of rights, the article moves toward more emancipatory political imaginaries that transcend statist boundaries.
Between Scepticism and Rigour: Greenwash and UK Advertising Regulation
Navraj Singh Ghaleigh, University of Edinburgh Law School
This article interrogates the regulatory efficacy of the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in addressing greenwashing within the broader framework of climate change litigation (CCL) and private legal regimes. While climate governance literature often eschews direct engagement with capitalism’s structurally extractive relationship to ecological degradation, regulatory strategies such as stranded asset discourse and corporate disclosure mechanisms exemplify efforts to reform from within. The ASA, a paradigmatic instance of an autonomous private legal regime, is examined as a site of regulatory innovation in the environmental advertising domain. Contrary to prevailing scepticism regarding the legitimacy and accountability of private regulators, the ASA demonstrates high epistemic competence, procedural robustness, and output legitimacy in adjudicating complex environmental claims. In this it deploys AI monitoring tools which although effective, do lack transparency in their usage. Similarly, although the ASA is found to be a highly effective regulator, even successful claimants can be involved in ‘whack-a-mole’ scenarios to shut down parallel online imprints. The paper further theorizes the proliferation of greenwashing typologies—greenlighting, greencrowding, greenshifting, greenclaiming, greenrinsing, and greenhushing—as indicative of a broader discursive and normative expansion akin to adjectival constitutionalism. While the ASA’s model offers a compelling case of regulatory success within a domestic context, the article cautions against uncritical transposition of its logic to other jurisdictions or climate governance arenas.
Beyond Economic Rationality: The Human Side of Insolvency
Emilie Ghio, University of Edinburgh Law School
Despite extensive legal reforms aimed at promoting a corporate rescue culture, rescue filings remain marginal in most jurisdictions. This chapter argues that the failure of the rescue culture cannot be explained solely by legal or economic shortcomings. Drawing on insights from psychology, sociology, and anthropology, it explores the human dimensions of insolvency and reveals how emotional, cognitive, social, and cultural factors shape debtor behaviour during financial distress. Key barriers include stigma, cognitive biases, emotional responses such as shame and fear, and the influence of cultural narratives and legal language. The chapter demonstrates that the prevailing economic model of the rational debtor, the “economic man”, fails to account for how real individuals make decisions under stress and uncertainty. Using empirical research and cross-jurisdictional comparisons, the chapter calls for a paradigm shift toward more human-centred insolvency frameworks. It argues for greater integration of interdisciplinary and empirical methods to uncover the real-world obstacles to rescue, with the aim of designing legal systems that resonate with the lived experiences of distressed businesses. Building a sustainable rescue culture, the chapter concludes, requires reframing insolvency not just as a financial event, but as a deeply human one.