| 8 mins read
Anya Pearson interviews Professor Lee Jarvis, Professor Michael Lister, and Doctor Alex Powell who have won the 2026 Bernard Crick Prize for the best article in the Political Quarterly in the past twelve months for 'Stop in the Law of the Name! Nominative Lawmaking, Populism and Justice'. Their article explores the growing influence of victim-led campaigns on UK lawmaking.
Congratulations on winning this year’s Crick Prize! Your article demonstrates that nominative laws—laws named after particular victims of violence or injustice—have become increasingly prominent in the UK. Can you explain what you mean, and give some examples?
Lee: Nominative law is a recent phenomenon that has grown quite dramatically in the 21st century but has been under studied to date. The term refers to campaigns for new laws or powers that are mobilised through the experiences of a specific named person.
Michael: We were initially looking at Martyn's Law, which requires public venues to improve security to counter the threat of terror attacks and is named after Martyn Hett who was killed in the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. Then we started seeing nominative lawmaking everywhere.
Lee: They tend to concern specific issue areas such as criminal justice, healthcare, and social policy; and typically involve demands for new rights or protections for citizens.
Michael: We found 30 examples of nominative lawmaking since 2006, with an obvious acceleration of the trend especially in the last four or five years.
What has been the most prominent rationale for nominative laws in the UK? And what are its benefits?
Alex: Naming a law after a person is seen as an act of memorialisation. It often calls attention to a specific issue and pushes for change. For example, Awaab’s Law drew attention to mouldy and damp accommodation and how it is dealt with by social landlords. But then, on the other hand, parliamentary scrutiny can be affected because politicians are saying: ‘We should pass this law to remember this person’ rather than picking apart the specific provisions of legislation. And then we could ask broader questions over who gets a named law and who doesn’t.
Named laws are often associated with a heightened democratic legitimacy. But you argue that nominative laws are consistent with broader threads of populism. Can you expand on this, giving examples?
Michael: Nominative lawmaking is less about pitting elites against ‘the people,’ (which is often seen as the “classic” definition of populism) but it is part of the wider trend of political elites invoking ordinary people, which has been explored by academics such as Alan Finlayson and Judy Atkins. That dynamic could explain why political elites seem to have become more receptive to campaigns for nominative lawmaking. We’d be interested to know whether these campaigns have existed for a long time, but elites are more interested in them now.
Ultimately, if people understand what a law does and why it exists, they are more likely to comply with it – enhancing its practical effectiveness. So is the practice defensible on an accessibility level?
Alex: There's a danger that we mistake simplicity with accessibility. If you look at Martyn's Law, you'd think it just means: ‘This requires organisations to make plans for possible terrorist incidents and how they will deal with it’. But that is a profound misrepresentation. You potentially end up with people incorrectly thinking that they understand new legislation. That is where the potential for populism comes in, because rather than talking about the complex political choices that they're making, politicians just say: ‘This is the law.’
As Baroness Kennedy has highlighted, the related issue of victim-led sentencing of this kind creates a hierarchy of ‘worthy’ victims. Do you agree?
Lee: Our suspicion is there might be gendered, racialised and other dynamics here. This could reproduce understandings of deserved victimhood.
How do you feel that this can be countered?
Lee: It’s a likely product of law that is made not on behalf of the public as a whole, but in an individualised sense. Particular classes or categories of people tend to be over-represented in nominative lawmaking, making it difficult to adequately guard against hierarchies of perceived vulnerability.
What are the other risks of this type of lawmaking?
Alex: There are issues around implementation. Politicians can say: ‘We passed this law. We've memorialised this person. Job done.’ But if you were to meaningfully implement laws around, say, public safety and put obligations onto local councils, you'd also need government to adequately resource that.
How does the UK experience compare internationally?
Michael: The comparative dimension is the next phase of our research programme. We know from the nascent literature that this phenomenon is also present in the US, where it's common for laws to be named after people, although they’re often named after members of Congress who sponsor the legislation. We've seen clear campaigns in Canada, Australia and Ireland as well.
In the US, legislators may strategically associate victims or incidents with pre-existing draft bills in order to enhance their chances of enactment. Are you concerned about this happening in the UK?
Michael: We haven’t seen much evidence of victims being used to fill a pre-defined legislative gap, although we haven't carried out in-depth research into this yet. Campaigns seems to be coming from the bottom up. But of course, politicians may pick and choose which ones to sponsor based on which areas interest them most.
Alex: This phenomenon might link to a broader US culture around strategic litigation – the identification of particular claimants to push on particular legal issues, not least because of the strong judicial review framework in the US compared to the UK. To date, there is less of a culture of strategic litigation in the UK. Although, this is also increasing in prominence here.
What are the challenges of criticising nominative lawmaking?
Michael: It can be difficult to critically engage with this sort of legislation because to question the appropriateness seems to be disrespectful of the pain and suffering behind it. But in a sense, that's the point. I read the second reading debate around Martyn's law and pretty much every contribution was a tribute to Martyn and his mother, Figen. She has done an amazing job, but there was very little criticism of the law. It almost seemed to be anti-scrutiny. Personally, it gives me a sense of disquiet to criticise these things, but that’s why these questions are worth asking.
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