Distributed ledgers and blockchain technology are widely expected to promote more direct shareholder involvement in corporate governance by reducing costs of voting and trade clearance. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence may shrink the decision-making terrain where corporations rely on human management. This article analyses these technologies and concludes that, while such outcomes are plausible, their potential corporate governance impacts are likely more complex and contingent. Despite the implicit libertarianism that characterises much of the discourse, we in fact have choices to make about how such technologies are developed and deployed – and these policy decisions will have to be grounded in a normative conception of corporate purpose external to the technology itself.

Recently, attention has been given to the question as to whether children should be used as covert human intelligence sources (CHIS), aka informers. Being a CHIS is a risky endeavour, particularly when the person is deployed against serious crime, for example, gang violence. Questions arise over the propriety of using adolescents as CHIS, and whether the regulation of covert sources serves to minimise the risk to them. This article considers the regulatory environment. It concludes that the use of juveniles as CHIS can be justified, but that additional safeguards must be put in place to ensure their safety.

This article focuses upon the provisions and underlying policy of the Landlord and Tenant Acts of 1927 and 1954. It surveys the mischief that each Act was designed to address and, from the perspective of compensation for business tenants, examines critically the legislative response. It demonstrates that the safeguards afforded by the 1927 Act were poorly conceived, ill-constructed and ineffectual. Although the 1954 Act was intended to instil simplicity, certainty and fairness, it fails on all counts. The law remains highly technical, unduly complex, arbitrary in operation and in need of major overhaul.

This article seeks to illustrate the kinds of difficulties that may follow from renouncing a unified approach to restitutionary claims for unjust enrichment. To do so, it draws on the experience of the French legal system, where the notion of unjustified enrichment describes a maxim inspiring various doctrines which have evolved in relative isolation from each other. Relying on this experience, the article argues that the objections recently raised by Nils Jansen against the German law of unjustified enrichment should not lead English lawyers to downplay the value of a unified approach to the subject.

According to an influential view, using the criminal law against innocent actions or agents is wrong. In this paper, I consider four related arguments against this view: a debunking argument that suggests that the intuitive appeal of this view may be due to a conflation of different ideas; a counterexamples argument that points out that there are many cases in which using the criminal law against innocent actions or agents is justified; a theoretical argument, according to which the force of the reasons for and against using the criminal law is a matter of degree and it is therefore implausible to hold that the latter always defeat the former; and an analogy argument, which holds that it is implausible to maintain that harming innocents is often justified in other contexts but (almost) never in the context of the criminal law.