Still Rising: The Career Politician in the British House of Commons, the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet

There is a public perception that politicians in the United Kingdom are increasingly detached from the electorate due to the apparent increase in the number of ‘career politicians’ with a professional background in politics. This article examines the occupational backgrounds of successful candidates to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom between the 1997 and 2010 general elections, comparing the parliamentary compositions of the three main political parties (Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats) during this period, and the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet as of 2014. By evaluating original and secondary quantitative data, it is argued that professionalised politicians have increased in the House of Commons relative to other occupational backgrounds, and are even further disproportionately represented in the senior teams of each major party.

On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth Century Britain (1695-1775)

Taking as its point of departure the lapse of the 1662 Licensing Act in 1695, this book examines the lead up to the passage of the Statute of Anne 1710 and charts the movement of copyright law throughout the eighteenth century, culminating in the House of Lords decision in Donaldson v Becket (1774). The established reading of copyright's development throughout this period, from the 1710 Act to the pronouncement in Donaldson, is that it was transformed from a publisher's right to an author's right; that is, legislation initially designed to regulate the marketplace of the bookseller and publisher evolved into an instrument that functioned to recognise the proprietary inevitability of an author's intellectual labour. The historical narrative which unfolds within this book presents a challenge to that accepted orthodoxy. The traditional analysis of the development of copyright in eighteenth-century Britain is revealed to exhibit the character of long-standing myth, and the centrality of the modern proprietary author as the raison d'etre of the modern copyright regime is displaced.

The Statute of Anne and the Great Abridgement Swindle

There are many things that we know about the Statute of Anne with reasonable certitude. We know that it was prefaced by a period of sustained lobbying on the part of the book trade. We know that on January 11, 1710 a bill was introduced in the House of Commons in response to this lobbying and that, less than three months later, on April 5, 1710, the act that is now commonly referred to as the Statute of Anne was passed. And we also know that the Act that was passed differed in many significant respects from the bill as it was originally introduced to parliament.
There are, however, many things that we don't - or can't - know about the Statute of Anne. This article considers one of those things that we don't or can't know; the extent to which the Act was intended to regulate the unauthorised production of derivative versions of published work (in this case, abridgements) if, indeed, it was intended to regulate the production of such works at all.