Intellectual Property is not a term with a standard meaning. Traditionally it was used to describe the copyright protection of authors and to distinguish this from industrial property, i.e., Patents for inventions, industrial design rights, plant variety rights, trade marks and the like. Recently it has become an umbrella for copyright, rights related to it and the various forms of industrial property. The new generic grouping has been needed for a world where demand for these rights has risen to an altogether new pitch. In part this is the consequence of extraordinary advances in technologies which make recorded information easily and precisely reproducible; and partly it supports the quest of advanced economies to conserve superior knowledge as a weapon in international trade.

Two important themes in Ronald Dworkin's work have contributed much to an understanding of Anglo-American law. He has insisted on the inter-connection between law and morality, emphasising the role of the judge's political morality in his judgments about the law. He has also argued that individual rights should be understood as anti-utilitarian or anti-majoritarian in character: they operate as constraints on majority decisions about the public interest or general welfare. In combination, these theories have provided an explanation of the legitimacy, in a democracy, of leaving undeniably “political” questions to unelected judges. Judges determine legal rights by applying (legal and political) principle. Matters of policy—understood as raising questions of the general welfare or the public interest— are primarily the concern of the other branches of government. Though policy questions are of concern to judges in the context of statutory construction, where the courts must decide what the legislature has in its wisdom enacted, it is their creative and evaluative role in respect of principle—concerning the moral and legal rights of individuals—which is the hallmark of adjudication, properly understood.1

It is doubtful whether there is a more famous court in Europe than the European Court of Human Rights. The town in which it is located, Strasbourg, has become a rallying cry for disappointed litigants from Iceland to Istanbul. Through its application of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Court is seen to have played an important role in the protection of individual freedom in western Europe, and its case-law has ballooned dramatically in recent years. So successful has it been that the Court's jurisdiction is coveted by the newly emerging democracies in eastern and central Europe as a badge of legitimacy and a bulwark against future tyranny. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Bulgaria already have judges on the Court and representatives from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are expected in the not too distant future. There is even talk of Russian membership. Moves are afoot to rationalise the Court's procedures, and to incorporate its law within the European Community.1 Some- time in the next few years it will have a fine new building, designed by Sir Richard Rogers. All the signs are that its jurisprudence will continue to grow at a hectic pace. It is not improbable that the Court will emerge over time as a supreme court of Europe, at least so far as human rights are concerned.