Why is it that intention, or intent, one of the basic concepts of the criminal law, remains so unclear? Judges decline to define it, and they appear to adjust it from one case to another.

Part of the trouble is the disagreement on the subject of intention amoung jurists generally. The Philosophers who have lately arrived on the scene, hoping to help the lawyers to slove their legal problems, in fact give only limited assistance. Their philosophical interest stems from the fact that intention is an important ethical concept, but they do not relate their discussions to any particular ethical concept, but they do not relate their discussions to any particular ethical theory, and they do not sufficiently consider the specific requirements of the criminal law. Indeed, they mix up the ordinary meaning of the word “intention” with its desirable legal meaning. To be sure, the meaning of intention as a technical term of the law ought to be close to the literary and popular one, but there are sound reasons for saying that the two should not always be indentical.

In recent years courts in the common law world have been concerned with their protective jurisdiction in the area of medical treatment; for example, the rights and status of the unborn foetus, the withholding of treatment from handicapped children, sterilisation, the provision of contraception, and the availability of abortion in relation to healthy and handicapped children and young adults.

In his first book, Taking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin opposed the view that law is a body of publicly ascertainable rules identifiable by some basic master test or rule of recognition. In place of that account he offered a rival vision. Law was portrayed as inherently controversial in content. Discovering the law on this or that subject is not, Dworkin argued, simply a matter of looking up the established rules: it is a matter of constructing a justificatory theory beneath which the established legal rules can be subsumed. In his latest book, Law's Empire, that account of the nature of law has been backed up by an analogous account of the nature of legal theory. A sound theory of law, we are told, is not one that unearths semantic rules governing the use of the word ‘law’. Disputes between rival legal theories do not hinge on the discovery of such deep semantic criteria, any more than disputes about the content of the law in hard cases hinge on the correct application of a rule of recognition. Disputes of both kinds are interpretive disputes: they concern the proper interpretation of legal practices.

The vagueness and uncertainty of application of the principles used to determine child custody appeals continue to cause great problems for the legal practitioner who must advise a client aggrieved by a decision at first instance. Child custody is an area where the right of appeal is unrestricted, but appeal court judges have nonetheless shown a marked tendency towards self-restraint in the exercise of their appellate jurisdiction. Two principal reasons are commonly given for this: first, the trial court in a child custody dispute often has a special advantage not possessed by the appeal court, in that it has seen and heard the witnesses; secondly, and more generally, the determination of a child custody dispute involves an exercise of discretion on the part of the trial court, in which the paramount consideration is the welfare of the child. For these reasons, which are considered in detail in the following section, it is perceived to be necessary to allow trial courts a degree of latitude. However, although the necessity for appellate self-restraint is generally accepted, there has been and continues to be wide disagreement as to the form which that self-restraint should take. In addition, there are many reported cases in which an appeal court has acknowledged the need for self-restraint, only to succumb to the temptation to intervene on the facts before it. The result of the absence of a principled justification for intervention is that there is no rational basis upon which parties can assess the strengths of their respective positions.