Completed projects

Reforms to hate crime laws to make them fairer, while also protecting freedom of expression

We published our advice to Government on 25 November 2021, concluding that the current legal framework in England and Wales is clearly able to facilitate and support the use of smart legal contracts.

The Government accepted the Law Commission’s recommendations to reform the communications offences, made in the 2021 Modernising Communications Offences report. The majority of the recommended offences, including offences of cyberflashing and encouraging or assisting serious self-harm, were implemented in the Online Safety Act 2023.

The Law Commission has published a report with draft legislation which would implement recommendations it made in July 2016 to modernise the rules on when consumers acquire ownership of goods under sales contracts.

The Law Commission published a report with draft legislation which would implement its recommendations to allow for the legal recognition of trade documents such as bills of lading and bills of exchange in electronic form. The recommendations were implemented in the Electronic Trade Documents Act 2023, which came into force in September 2023.

We published our final recommendations on 4 December 2020.

A review of the Official Secrets Acts to make sure Britain is safe in the 21st century. The project has now concluded.

Making commonhold a preferred alternative to leasehold ownership. We published our report on commonhold (“Reinvigorating commonhold: the alternative to leasehold ownership”) on 21 July 2020.

All three residential leasehold and commonhold reports were published on 21 July 2020. Further details are available on the project-specific pages by following the links below.