A Step Too Far? Whittington Hospital NHS Trust v XX [2020] UKSC 14

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsty Horsey ◽  
Andrew Powell
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Family Formation ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court

Abstract This comment piece explores the decision in Whittington Hospital NHS Trust v XX [2020] UKSC 14. It argues that despite notable shifts in public policy in respect of the acceptability of surrogacy as a means of family formation in the past twenty years, the Supreme Court has taken a step too far in deciding that foreign commercial surrogacy is as widely socially accepted. This impacts on the reasonableness of any claim for damages in negligence for the costs of commercial surrogacy. It is posited that the issue of whether damages for foreign commercial surrogacy are reasonable or not will be the key battleground in future negligence cases of this type.

Surrogacy and public policy

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 588-595
Author(s):  
Elaine O’Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Law

The Supreme Court in the United Kingdom has held that it is not contrary to public policy to award damages in tort to fund a commercial surrogacy in another jurisdiction where this is lawful. This significant decision, in the case of Whittington Hospital NHS Trust v XX [2020] UKSC 14, will potentially have an impact on the regulation and reform of surrogacy law in the United Kingdom, Ireland and internationally. The judgment delivered by Lady Hale draws attention to multiple inconsistencies in the law, and it highlights, in particular, the need for effective regulation of domestic surrogacy. Legislators face an important and imminent challenge to reconcile the reality of commercial surrogacy with a deficient legal framework. This article seeks to highlight some of the important issues which this case has raised when considering regulation and reform of surrogacy law.

Surrogacy and public policy

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (AD2) ◽  
pp. 29-35
Author(s):  
Elaine O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Law

The Supreme Court in the United Kingdom has held that it is not contrary to public policy to award damages in tort to fund a commercial surrogacy in another jurisdiction where this is lawful. This significant decision, in the case of Whittington Hospital NHS Trust v XX [2020] UKSC 14, will potentially have an impact on the regulation and reform of surrogacy law in the United Kingdom, Ireland and internationally. The judgment delivered by Lady Hale draws attention to multiple inconsistencies in the law, and it highlights, in particular, the need for effective regulation of domestic surrogacy. Legislators face an important and imminent challenge to reconcile the reality of commercial surrogacy with a deficient legal framework. This article seeks to highlight some of the important issues which this case has raised when considering regulation and reform of surrogacy law.

Summary of Results

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Kuenzler
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Government Agencies ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Trademark Law ◽  
Intellectual Property Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Government ◽  
Networked Economy

The persuasive force of the accepted account’s property logic has driven antitrust and intellectual property law jurisprudence for at least the past three decades. It has been through the theory of trademark ownership and the commercial strategy of branding that these laws led the courts to comprehend markets as fundamentally bifurcated—as operating according to discrete types of interbrand and intrabrand competition—a division that had an effect far beyond the confines of trademark law and resonates today in the way government agencies and courts evaluate the emerging challenges of the networked economy along the previously introduced distinction between intertype and intratype competition. While the government in its appeal to the Supreme Court in ...

The supreme court and public policy

1987 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 326-376
Author(s):  
Patricia D. Scearse
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The Supreme Court

scholarly journals The Impact of the Voting Rights Act on American Political Parties

1994 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 565-575
Author(s):  
Howard A. Scarrow
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Legal Standards ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Impact

The weakening of American political parties has been a theme featured in the writings of political scientists for the past several decades. This essay is addressed to developments which may further that decline-developments which have undermined the very purpose which American political parties are said to serve. I refer to legal standards which were established by the Supreme Court in 1964, and which have since been expanded by the Court and then incorporated into the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its amendment in 1982.

11. Illegality

2020 ◽  
pp. 405-434
Author(s):  
Jack Beatson ◽  
Andrew Burrows ◽  
John Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Common ◽  
Restraint Of Trade

This chapter considers what counts as illegality and the effect of illegality on a contract (and consequent restitution). The approach of the Courts to illegality has been transformed for the better, and simplified, by the Supreme Court in Patel v Mirza in 2016. Illegal conduct, tainting a contract, can vary widely from serious crimes (eg murder) to relatively minor crimes (eg breach of licensing requirements) through to civil wrongs and to conduct that does not comprise a wrong but is contrary to public policy. As regards the effect of illegality, where a statute does not deal with this, the common law approach is now to apply a range of factors. A final section of the chapter examines contracts in restraint of trade.

International Commercial Surrogacy as a New Head of Tortious Damage: XX v Whittington Hospital NHS Trust [2018] EWCA Civ 2832

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-207
Author(s):  
John Lucas M Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Tort Law ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Court Of Appeal

Abstract In XX v Whittington Hospital NHS Trust [2018] EWCA Civ 2832, the Court of Appeal recognised commercial surrogacy in California as a permissible head of damage in a case of negligently inflicted infertility. Due to changing public policies and judicial opinion regarding the practice, and by incorporating the three-part test of illegality developed for civil claims by the Supreme Court in Patel v Mirza [2016] UKSC 42 into tort law, the Court of Appeal held that the principle of restorative justice required a departure from the precedent established in Briody v St Helens and Knowsley AHA [2001] EWCA Civ 1010.

Narratives of the Constitutional Covenant

Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Peter Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Planned Parenthood ◽  
Stare Decisis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
American Society ◽  
Narrative Rhetoric

The constitutional narrative plays perhaps a surprisingly important role in American society. It claims to unfold present judgment from past precedent, according to the doctrine of stare decisis, given an eloquent exposition by the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, where the Constitution is referred to as a “covenant” among generations. Analysis of this and other covenantal narratives spun by the Court suggests that despite the emphasis on precedent they may work according to the retrospective logic of narrative itself, in which elements become functional in terms of what follows them. Plots work from end to beginning, reinterpreting the past in terms of the present. The Supreme Court opinion, when subjected to an analysis sensitive to its narrative rhetoric, suggests something akin to the structure of prophecy and fulfillment in its composition of the covenantal narrative.

scholarly journals Forty Years of Death: The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty in South Carolina (Still Arbitrary after All These Years)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Blume ◽  
Lyndsey S. Vann
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Gender Bias ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Looking Back

11 Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 183 (2016)Forty years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States deemed constitutional new death penalty laws intended to minimize the arbitrariness which led the Court to invalidate all capital sentencing statutes four years earlier in Furman v. Georgia. Over the last four decades the Court has — time and again — attempted to regulate the “machinery of death.” Looking back over the Court’s work, many observers, including two current Supreme Court justices, have questioned whether the modern death penalty has lived up to expectations set by the Court in the 1970s or if, despite 40 years of labor, the American death penalty continues to be administered in an unconstitutionally arbitrary manner. This Article presents data from South Carolina’s forty-year experiment with capital punishment and concludes that the administration of the death penalty in that state is still riddled with error and infected with racial and gender bias. It is — in short — still arbitrary after all these years. The authors maintain that the only true cure it to abolish South Carolina’s death penalty, although they do argue that lesser steps including additional safeguards and procedure may limit, but will not eliminate, some of the arbitrariness and bias which are present in the current imposition of South Carolina’s most extreme punishment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document