This article explores how the legal system has constructed, over time, the concept of the “wage”. Drawing on insights from classical political economy it contrasts a conception of the wage as the cost of social reproduction (a “social wage”), with the neoclassical notion of the wage as the price of a commodity (a “market wage”) that we see embedded in legal and political discourse today. Drawing on historical sources, it explores how these competing ideas of the wage have been reconstructed in juridical language in case law and legislation over time, exploring at the same time the impact of this process on the relationship between minimum wages and tax credits. This analysis is then used to shed light on the conception of the wage embedded in the National Minimum Wage Act 1998, providing a critical re-evaluation of the “National Living Wage” introduced in 2016.

This article argues that the public figure doctrine is doctrinally problematic and conceptually and normatively flawed. Doctrinal uncertainty surrounds who is affected and how rights are affected. Conceptually it raises challenges for universality, the non-hierarchical relationship between Articles 8 and 10 ECHR, the process of resolving rights conflicts, and the relationship between domestic law and the Convention. All of which necessitate a strong normative justification for the distinction. Yet there is no compelling rationale. The values underpinning the right to privacy of public figures are no different from those of other persons and there are other better mechanisms of accounting for freedom of expression. We should therefore reject the idea that public figures have fewer or weaker privacy rights or that the process of dealing with their rights is different and instead focus squarely upon the relative importance of the rights, and the degree of intrusion into those rights.

Existing definitions of agency are inadequate. In this paper, I offer a new definition of agency: a relationship is one of agency where the agent has a power to exercise at least one of the principal's own powers. I call this a “proxy power” for short. This definition brings with it three advantages. First, focusing on the agent's proxy power highlights the distinctive idea at the core of agency: that people can act through others at law, thereby expanding their legal personality in space. Second, that distinctive idea then helps identify the three reasons justifying when an agent has a proxy power: the principal's unilateral manifestation of will, the necessity of protecting the principal's interests, and where the principal is an artificial person who can only unilaterally manifest his will through an agent. Third, the definition vindicates prevailing intuitions about agency, and gives us a more transparent way to decide whether or one's invocation of “agency” is illegitimate or legitimate.

This article argues that public property rights should be recognised as a separate category of property interest, different and distinct from private and common property interests and conferring distinctive rights and obligations on both “owners” and members of the public. It develops a taxonomy to differentiate private, public and common property rights. The article concludes that it is a mistake to think in terms of “private property”, “common property” or “public property”. The division and allocation of resource entitlements in land can result in private, common and public property rights subsisting over the same land simultaneously, in different combinations and at different times. The categorisation of property interests in land (as private, common or public) may also shift and change from time to time. The article considers the importance of distinguishing between private, common and public property interests for developing new strategies for environmental governance, and for implementing the effective protection of natural resources.

The article focuses on the “legitimate interest in performance” requirement which is now at the heart of the new test on penalty clauses but which has been left undefined by the Supreme Court in Cavendish Square Holding BV v Talal El Makdessi and ParkingEye Ltd v Beavis [2016]. It seeks to bring clarity to what is meant by “legitimate interest in performance” by examining other areas of the law of remedies for breach of contract where concepts of legitimate interest have featured in the court’s reasoning. It also makes suggestions as to what considerations are or might be relevant in determining whether a contracting party has a legitimate interest in performance, in particular a legitimate interest that goes beyond compensation.

The value of civility is grounded upon acceptance of the legitimacy of moral disagreement and the need for mutual respect and cooperation in the face of such disagreement. The distinction between rights and goods plays a fundamental role in the form of civility espoused by liberal society. Current models of constitutional rights and proportionality, in a variety of ways, erode that distinction and thereby place the liberal model of civility in jeopardy.