| 7 mins read
On 3 April 2025, the UK’s new Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill gained Royal Assent. A response to the Manchester Arena attack of May 2017, the bill aims to improve protection from terrorism for visitors to public venues such as nightclubs, shopping centres, museums, theatres, and cinemas. For parliamentarians, publics, and the estimated 180,000 premises affected by its provisions, this new law will be much more familiar by its alternative moniker, ‘Martyn’s Law’: a name derived from Martyn Hett, one of the victims of the 2017 attack.
Naming of a law after a person – nominative lawmaking - appears to be something of a growing trend in the UK, with at least nine examples implemented since 2020 alone. Despite this, the phenmomenon remains almost entirely neglected within academic research. This is unfortunate, we suggest, because nominative lawmaking raises important questions about politics, justice, and memory.
What do nominative laws do?
Nominative laws appear to cluster around four themes within policymaking: rights, obligations, protections and punishments.
First, is the creation or extension of rights, apparent in the example of Clare’s Law, after Clare Wood, which underpins the UK’s Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (DVDS) and generated a ‘right to ask’ and a ‘right to know’ in relation to a partner’s violent or abusive past. Another important example here is Sarah’s Law, after Sarah Payne, which became the Child Sex Offender Disclosure scheme, functioning under Police guidance, and enabling concerned parties to request information regarding previous child sex offences.
A second key ambition is to generate new obligations upon organisations, professionals, or role-holders to prevent future harms. Martyn’s Law, with which we began, does this by obligating public premises to improve their preparedness for terrorist attacks including through training and risk management activities. Awaab’s Law imposes new requirements on social landlords for the investigation and correction of harms such as mould and damp. Manifesting in the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023, landlords are required by Awaab’s Law to investigate and fix reported health hazards within specified time frames.
Linked to the emphasis on mitigating harm in the above categories is a third type of nominative law aimed at protecting particular subjects or publics. Provisions for incorporating independent domestic abuse specialists within emergency control rooms under Raneem’s Law, after Raneem Oudeh, are currently being trialled in five police departments. Relatedly, the campaign for Emily’s Law, debated in Parliament in February 2015, proposes greater consistency in airline announcements relating to food allergies.
A final category seeks to introduce or extend punishment provisions for those guilty of harmful or illegal activity. Jade’s Law, after Jade Ward, is now incorporated in the UK’s Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 and automatically suspends the parental rights of those found guilty of killing their children’s co-parents. Proponents of Violet-Grace’s law, after Violet-Grace Youens, argued that death by dangerous driving should attract a life sentence, a possibility which was actualised within the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022.
How to make sense of nominative laws?
To understand the growing prominence of nominative lawmaking, it is helpful to situate the phenomenon within wider social and political trends.
First, is the increasing visibility of ‘ordinary people’ within mainstream politics, facilitated by transformations in today’s media ecology, and a wider scepticism toward politicians and ‘experts’. This trend is sometimes captured by Graeme Turner’s phrase ‘the demotic turn’.
Second, is an increasingly populist tone within British politics, such that political leaders increasingly draw on the experiences or voices of citizens to claim authenticity for their decisions and actions.
Third, is the performative nature of contemporary politics such that named laws come to be seen as a substantive form of political action in their own right. Laws such as those considered above become ends as much as they are means to prevent future harm. Their enactment is seen to be important as a way of securing justice for exemplary victims of tragedy and their loved ones. As one legislator argued, discussing Violet-Grace’s Law in Parliament, ‘Causing death by dangerous driving deserves a life sentence. That is the Justice that Violet-Grace Youens’s parents deserved. Their angelic four-year-old daughter Violet-Grace was so cruelly taken from them’.
Why do nominative laws matter?
Using language from classical rhetoric, we might argue that nominative laws have particular political power because they: draw on the ethos or character of their sponsor which is typically rooted in authentic and deeply tragic experiences of injustice; stimulate an audience’s pathos or emotions through emphasising individual exemplary victims; and work through a deductive logos by naming and addressing the risk of future harm to others. This power, moreover, is facilitated by developments in wider media and political ecologies, not least the increasing presence of ‘ordinary’ people and their experiences that is characteristic of demotic and populist politics. And the introduction of these laws stands as a very specific form of political performance that produces the justice it claims to represent in the memory of specific victims.
Nominative laws provide important opportunities for marking and remembering injustices, and accelerating political action. The growing trend of nominative lawmaking equips ‘ordinary’ citizens with the agency to make substantive, meaningful, change on issues that matter to them, especially in relation to public health or wellbeing, helping citizens to set political agendas and to produce meaningful social and political change.
At the same time, there are two important risks associated with this trend. First is the risk that such laws close down opportunity for political contestation or debate by virtue of the victimhoods on which they are predicated. It is much harder to oppose or question legislation when such legislation is proposed as a form of justice for victims of tragic harm or wrongdoing. A second risk is that individual tragedies can be instrumentalised by politicians for their own gain, and – in so doing – help undermine established constitutional safeguards, principles, and professionals for the purposes of political grand-standing or point-scoring.
Digested read produced by the author, based on an upcoming journal article.
