Of all the changes to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 that were introduced in 2008 by legislation of the same name, foremost to excite media attention and popular controversy was the amendment of the so-called welfare clause. This clause forms part of the licensing conditions which must be met by any clinic before offering those treatment services covered by the legislation. The 2008 Act deleted the statutory requirement that clinicians consider the need for a father of any potential child before offering a woman treatment, substituting for it a requirement that clinicians must henceforth consider the child’s need for ‘‘supportive parenting’’.

This essay reviews Skeggs’ and Wilson’s papers in this issue of Feminist Legal Studies in terms of their development of, and departure from, ideas central to the Italian post-Marxist, post-workerist tradition; speci?cally their understanding that capital is increasingly converging with the production and reproduction of social life itself. I interrogate the assumed necessity to move beyond ‘the limitations of Marx’ by revealing, via the Communist Manifesto, Grundrisse and Capital, how the ideas of ‘old’ Marx can offer important engagements and interlocutions with the ‘new’ empirical phenomena explored by Skeggs and Wilson.

Feminist legal efforts to make sense of the external migration policies of the European Union (EU) have focused almost exclusively on the EU’s initiatives against traf?cking in women. This article examines one of the more neglected areas of EU immigration policy—the return of ‘illegal immigrants’. It analyses the so-called 2008 Returns Directive in the light of the multidimensional inequalities experienced by migrant women, which affect their migration status and expose some of them to the threat of removal. Owing to insecurities over external migration, the Directive constructs even the most vulnerable migrants as a threat to be controlled and is likely to result in detrimental consequences for many migrants, and in particular already vulnerable women who are likely to be further disadvantaged by it.

This research note focuses on the relationship between organised crime and corruption in Italy. It is part of a wider research project investigating that relationship across a number of European countries. In the first part of this contribution, along with a brief account of definitional issues, a summary review of previous work on the connections between organised crime and corruption is provided. The paper then attempts to delineate the uniqueness of the Italian case through some observations around the specific contours of organised and corrupt exchange in the country as they manifest themselves.

In North America and Europe, numerous books, articles, and monographs on pirates have been published in the past three decades. Although these publications do provide readers valuable information about piratical activities around the world, few of these contain a categorization of pirates. The purpose of this paper is to develop a typology for historical and modern pirates. This taxonomy is composed of three factors: position of state managers, ideology, and continuity of piracy. Each of these factors is divided into two