Polly Botsford

3 weeks ago | legalcheek.com | Polly Botsford

Polarised responseWhen Lord Hodge handed down the Supreme Court’s judgment in For Women Scotland on the meaning of man and woman in the UK’s Equality Act recently, the court was, he said: “Well aware of the strength of feeling on all sides.” That may be the understatement of the year. Within days of the decision, which found that the UK’s main equality law refers to biological sex, protests were held outside Parliament and the Supreme Court by trans rights supporters.

1 month ago | legalcheek.com | Polly Botsford

Polly Botsford delves into Professor Richard Susskind’s ‘darker’ latest book and wonders: ‘Where has Reassuring Richard gone?’Richard Susskind has always been an optimist, thinking and writing about tech and the law without being a doomsayer, never a naysayer, an everything-possible kind of guy. Even when he was talking about the end of lawyers, it sounded like a positive (even for lawyers).

1 month ago | legalcheek.com | Polly Botsford

Top judges unanimous decision that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in UK equality legislation mean biological sexIn a dense, 87-page judgment, the Supreme Court has found that UK equality legislation refers to biological sex “as a matter of ordinary language”. Interpreting ‘sex’ as including trans men or women who have a Gender Recognition Certificate would not have been workable as a matter of statutory interpretation, and “would cut across the definitions … in an incoherent way”.

2 months ago | legalcheek.com | Polly Botsford

As legal challenges mount, US President escalates his attack on law firms In just the first seven weeks of his presidency, the Trump Administration faced an astonishing 119 legal challenges — an average of two per day, according to data from Just Security, a journal of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law, which is tracking the litigation.

Nov 26, 2024 | legalcheek.com | Polly Botsford

Top judges hear case on whether trans women can be considered female under Equality ActIn a case that could have UK-wide implications for single-sex spaces such as women’s refuges, hospital wards, prisons and changing rooms, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments today about who falls within the definitions of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ in anti-discrimination law and whether they include people who have been certified as such with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC).