A local authority which was ordered to pay more than £420,000 compensation to a disappointed job applicant in respect of race discrimination has failed to convince the Court of Appeal that the drain on public funds was disproportionate. Arguments that the London Borough of Hackney should not have been made jointly and severally liable to satisfy the award were...

The established regime whereby applicants for jobs requiring contact with children or vulnerable adults have their entire criminal records disclosed to prospective employers has been declared incompatible with human rights.  The Court of Appeal ruled that the blanket disclosure of all past offences, regardless of their antiquity or triviality, was a...

Although an ex-wife fully understood the terms of a divorce settlement by which she agreed to pay her former husband a total of £450,000, a family judge was entitled to exercise her discretion under Section 31 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1993 to vary the agreement when the woman fell on hard times. The Court of Appeal rejected the ex-husband’s arguments...

In what will be viewed as a serious blow to creators of computer software, the High Court has ruled that copyright in a computer program does not protect either the programming language in which it is written or its functionality from being copied by others. The claimant was the developer of widely used analytical software (the software) which had been developed...

A consultant psychiatrist employed at a high-security hospital who has been accused of breaching confidentiality by leafing through a patient’s medical notes on a crowded train will face an internal disciplinary panel after the Court of Appeal underlined the gravity of the allegations. Unbeknown to the consultant, sitting across the aisle from her during the...