THE public domain is all the rage. It is invoked to breach copyright’s encroaching enclosure of what one might grandiloquently call the cultural commons of the mind. The heralds of our “remix culture” deploy the public domain to smash that icon of the entertainment–industrial complex, the Romantic Author. But even before the Author became Romantic, he still served as a shill for concentrated industry, then the printing–bookselling complex. Authors’ moral claims of labourious entitlement merely masked the power grab of the printers. If we speak of a grab, we imply that copyright was seised from somewhere. So whence, in this account, was copyright wrested? From the public domain.

ENGLISH public law has gained in coherence with the gradual disappearance of rigid doctrinal barriers to judicial review. The repudiation of earlier restrictions on review of ministers’ exercise of the royal prerogative marked a particularly significant step towards a more rational system of legal control. It is true that acknowledgement of the susceptibility of prerogative decisions to judicial review, in principle, was accompanied by warnings about the constraints of justiciability in practice; but the various supposed categories of non-justiciable decision-making have been gradually breached and eroded in the course of common law development. When individual rights have required protection, neither the formal source of the power in question nor its intrinsically discretionary character have proved impenetrable barriers to judicial scrutiny.

TWO important decisions have recently considered the effect of human rights law on domestic property law: Kay v. Lambeth L.B.C.; Leeds C.C. v. Price, and J.A. Pye (Oxford) Ltd. v. United Kingdom. In each case, the claimant brought a domestic proprietary claim, one successfully, the other unsuccessfully, against a defendant. The aggrieved party argued that the domestic legal outcome conflicted with his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. In each case, the court had to decide whether the Convention had indeed been infringed by the bringing of a proprietary claim and, if so, what the consequences of that infringement might be.