Legal judgment, I argue, entails moral judgment; legal obligations, correctly identified, are genuine moral obligations. Dworkin's legal theory is instructive, but problematic: his account of integrity fails to provide a convincing reconciliation of practice and principle. We can, however, defend a superior account in which the moral ideals that we invoke to justify legal practice – affirming its legitimacy under certain conditions – retain their force throughout our judgments about its specific demands in particular cases. Common law reasoning exemplifies that approach, reflecting the interdependence of practice and principle. It is an internal, interpretative inquiry, drawing on the moral resources of our own tradition, treated as an influential guide to the requirements of justice. The law is constituted, accordingly, neither by its socially authoritative sources, whatever their merits, nor by the moral effects of our legal practice. It is rather the scheme of justice we construct in our continuing efforts to bring our practice closer to the ideals that inspire and redeem it.

A troubling veil of mystery still shrouds the central institution of the British Constitution – the Crown. In this paper, I examine the modern utility of five historical doctrines: the doctrine of the “King's two bodies”; the doctrine that the Crown is a “corporation sole”; the doctrine that the King can “do no wrong”; the doctrine that (high) public offices are “emanations” of the Crown; and the doctrine that the Crown is “one and indivisible”. Using some insights from social ontology, the history of office in the Western legal tradition, and the sociology of role and status, I argue that the first four of these doctrines can be refashioned into a conception of the Crown as an office. An office is an enduring institutional entity to which individuals bear a relationship from time to time, but which is separate from any individual incumbent and is to be considered in legal analysis as a separate acting subject. Using the logic of office, official personality and official action, I distinguish between the Queen, the Crown, Her Majesty's Government and the Commonwealth and argue that together they provide a serviceable model of the modern British Constitution. The final doctrine, however, must be abandoned – the Crown is plural and divisible and this must be taken into account when using the Crown to reason about the UK's relationship to other constitutional orders.

The significant evolution in family law in the last four decades has seen the breaking down of traditional barriers: illegitimacy has been swept away, and children conceived through assisted reproduction are now recognised as the legal children of their parents, even absent a genetic link. Transgender heirs are also fully recognised in their new gender. Yet fundamental exceptions remain in the case of succession to titles, honours, dignities and coats of arms, discriminating against children born out of marriage, or non-genetic children, or transgender children. The decision of the Privy Council in Pringle of Stichill emphasised this divergence, and raised the question of whether law reform is needed. In this article, we explore the rules which govern succession to titles and dignities and the two-tier system which has arisen. By pointing out the inconsistencies and lack of rationale therefor, we make the case for law reform to bring titles and dignities into line with the current understanding of family and succession.

The role of the UK Supreme Court (UKSC) as conventionally understood is to give effect to, and not to challenge, the will of Parliament. At the same time, the UK's constitution forces the UKSC to develop a constitutional jurisprudence to resolve clashes of higher-order principles, for instance between parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. This development puts the legitimacy of unelected and unaccountable judges invalidating legislation under the spotlight. Instead of arguing for US-style strike-down powers, I argue that cautious and corrective judicial intervention is constitutionally mandated and democratically legitimate.

Eighteenth-century courts needed to rely on presumptions in favour of marriage for a number of reasons, some practical and some legal, but the misleading reporting of one leading nineteenth-century case, followed by institutional changes and a stronger focus on precedent, led to the original evidential assumptions being obscured. A further blurring of the different strands of the presumption occurred in the twenty-first century, leading to confusion in recent cases. Understanding how the much-misunderstood presumptions have developed reveals why they were needed, when they became decoupled from their evidential underpinnings, and how, when and why they should operate today.