Dr James Kolaczkowski and Dr David Barrett have funding from the Midland Clawback Campaign to investigate State Pension Integration, also known as ‘Clawback’ or ‘State Deduction’ that can result in the reduction of an occupational pension to take account of the state pension. Discretion as to how it is applied may mean that women and lower paid workers are disproportionately impacted. Interviews with members of the HSBC Bank (UK) Pension Scheme that were previously employed by the Midland Bank will be used as a case study, it is reported that 52,000 members of this scheme may be affected by Clawback.
Published at the end of April 2022 by Oxford University Press, Dr Robert Herian has contributed a chapter to the first interdisciplinary account of smart contracts from a leading group of judges, practitioners, computer scientists, and legal scholars, which scrutinises the notion of extra-legal ‘smart contracts’ and makes inroads towards a more rigorous and technology-neutral understanding of encoded contracts. The edited collection provides an analysis of the earliest judicial responses to software-based contracts as well as into current law reform and thought leadership projects.
Lisa Cherkassky, Senior Lecturer in Law, is finishing her PhD through publication at Manchester University this year, and has agreed to present her work at their annual postgraduate research conference on Tuesday 10th May 2022 at the Pendulum Hotel in Manchester. The topic is posthumous conception, and she asks whether we should be removing gametes (sperm and eggs) from the deceased, and whether a best interests test would suffice if the patient was instead in a comatose state. These are controversial topics because there is currently no law covering these procedures, but court orders are beginning to authorise them in several jurisdictions. Lisa has already published three articles in the field and has two out for review, and this presentation is an accumulation of her work on the topic since 2019.