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In this paper, we investigate patterns of team formation amongst barristers who appeared before the UK Supreme Court between October 2009 and August 2015. We show that there is evidence of considerable gender homophily in the formation of teams of barristers appearing before the UK Supreme Court. Same-sex teams of barristers are over-represented compared to the number we would expect if barristers paired up randomly. We also show that this gender homophily remains when we allow for the possibility that barristers pair up randomly within their chambers, or within their area of law. As such, the formation of teams of barristers in the Supreme Court is governed by practices and preferences which make same-sex legal teams more likely than they would be if team formation simply involved a gender-blind draw from a pool of lawyers. Barristers appearing before the Supreme Court prefer, for whatever reason, to work with other barristers of the same sex. We set out reasons why homophily in team formation is undesirable and discuss the routes through which different remedies might operate.

The aim of the Equality Act 2010 (‘the Act’) is principally equal treatment. The Act brings all ‘protected characteristics’ together into one piece of legislation, all separate ‘silos’ but in theory equal before the law, no one more important than the other. However in recent years as the number of protected characteristics has increased, tensions have emerged within the case law. Some protected characteristics may have an impact on one’s ability to do a particular job at particular times, such as disability, and are subject to special rules. Others, such as sexual orientation, sex, race and religion, should have no impact and ought therefore to be ignored by an employer. As demonstrated by religious discrimination cases and disability discrimination cases , the Act can lead to tensions and a possible ‘emerging hierarchy’. \ud This paper seeks to explore the equal treatment principle and the protection offered by the Act and suggests that a developing hierarchy is inevitable given the way the law is framed. The intention of this research is in part to explore these hierarchies but also to consider how these tensions can lead to perceptions of in-equality within protected groups which can impact on they way individuals access work and are subsequently supported in employment. The aim, in the first instance, is to explore these ideas using data gleaned from an analysis of law firm employee networks to explore issues of diversity within the legal profession.

This thesis is concerned with REACH, the EU Regulation on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals, and its regulator, the European Chemicals Agency (‘ECHA’). It has two overriding objectives. The first is to provide an exposition of REACH. The Regulation is vast and has been called, "possibly the most controversial and complex piece of legislation in European history", by one of the EU Commissioners who oversaw its genesis. Despite (or possibly because of) this, there is comparatively little substantive writing on REACH. \ud \ud The second aim of this thesis is to explore REACH using new governance literature and, in particular, writing which looks at post legislative norm elaboration via the use of guidance. The text of the Regulation stands at more than 130,000 words. The most recent consolidated version of REACH is 516 pages long. The Regulation is complex and dense and lengthy. Accompanying this complex legislation are more than one million words of official guidance produced by ECHA. To date, there have been a small handful of case studies which use particular legislative regimes to explore the challenges posed by post legislative norm elaboration via guidance. The yoking of post legislative soft norms to REACH has seen a complex transformation; one which was only partially foreseen in the Regulation (and likely also only partly foreseen in the minds of the legislature). As such, REACH is a good example of an evolving system of EU governance that is both associated with the Community Method and is also differentiated, new, complex and nuanced. However, REACH also acts as a challenge to a number of assumptions in the new governance literature, including: that new governance is non-hierarchical; that yoked soft norms are complementary and come only from the state; and that soft law elaborates solely on framework norms.