Leigh considers the competing and legally interlocking claims of local representative democracy, financial accountability and consumerism, and their implications for the governing structures of local authorities and for local electors, councillors, taxpayers, the users of local services, and council employees.

More than five years after the commencement of the UK's Human Rights Act 1998, it is timely to evaluate the Act's effectiveness. The focus of Making Rights Real is on the extent to which the Act has delivered on the promise to 'bring rights home.' The book considers how the judiciary, Parliament, and the executive in the UK have performed in the new roles that the Human Rights Act requires them to play. This account cuts through the rhetoric and controversy surrounding the Act, generated by its champions and detractors alike, to reach a measured assessment. The true impact on public law,...

Examining the law and public policy relating to religious liberty in Western liberal democracies, this book contains a detailed analysis of the history, rationale, scope, and limits of religious freedom from (but not restricted to) an evangelical Christian perspective. Focusing on United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and EU, it studies the interaction between law and religion at several different levels, looking at the key debates that have arisen.
Divided into three parts, the book begins by contrasting the liberal and Christian rationales for and...