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The thorny ramifications of the Modern Slavery Act

States resort to criminal law when they either can’t or won’t tackle root causes. The Modern Slavery Act is just another example of applying the stick to ‘solve’ a fundamentally socio-economic issue.

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Amazon UK Fulfilment Centre - Peterborough. Chris Radburn/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)

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Peter Ramsay is an Associate Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He reads, thinks and writes about the relation of criminal law to civil liberties, to democracy and to security. He is working on a theory of the penal law that explains its historical development as an aspect of the democratisation and subsequent ‘post-democratisation’ of modern states. He is the author of The Insecurity State: Vulnerable Autonomy and the Right to Security in the Criminal Law (Oxford, 2012). He is Associate Editor, New Criminal Law Review.

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