I argue that process and substance are two aspects of the public law form and that the form conditions the content of the law. The reduction of a political programme to the explicit terms of a statute involves a conversion of policy into public standards, which produces a kind of legal surplus value. It brings into being a particular type of public standard – one that permits the operation of the principles identified by Lon L. Fuller as the desiderata of the inner morality of law, and which enables individual claims of right based on legal principle to be adjudicated.

INRegulating Contracts Hugh Collins takes up the challenge presented by 40 years of empirical studies which show that business people make little use of contract law in settling disputes, preferring instead to rely on trust and various non-legal sanctions to organise their transactions. Indeed, business parties often actively avoid the use of law because of its expense, inconvenience and tendency to harm business relationships. These findings pose a challenge to traditional doctrinal scholars. If business parties do not make much use of contract law, one has to ask what role it does play and whether the attention that is paid to it by orthodox legal scholars is misplaced. Regulating Contracts takes on this challenge directly and is the most substantial attempt made so far to explain the role of contract law in light of the questions raised as to its usefulness.

The concept of authority is one which may be explicated in many ways—normatively, psychologically, sociologically, politically. That is to say, one may seek to show how it is used in the contexts of normative justifications or of assertions about psychological, sociological or political phenomena. As a normative concept, “authority” relates to situations in which there is given as a reason warranting that something should, must not, or may be done the fact that a particular individual or individuals has so laid it down.

Fifty years ago the rights of a parent were held in high regard by English law. Since then there has taken place a fairly steady erosion of those rights, so that the picture presented today differs quite markedly from that of the early 1920s.

When the holders of endowed chairs give inaugural lectures it is common for the lecture to begin with a respectful tribute to the achievements of the distinguished scholars in whose shoes the incumbent now stands. In the case of a personal chair this is obviously not possible. It is appropriate, though, that I should none the less acknowledge here the intellectual debts that I owe to others. But those who might be mentioned are very numerous. And in order to avoid having to draw invidious distinctions and being bound to offend someone, by commission or omission, I will mention only two giants of scholarship who have both had a profound influence upon me. They are both no longer with us but they remain influential in the work of others including myself.

In certain circumstances the fact that an agreement is made under pressure is sufficient reason to invalidate what would otherwise be a good contract. The rules providing for invalidation in such cases are found in the textbooks under the headings of duress and, to a less extent, undue influence and unconscionability. That the existence of pressure sometimes is and should be sufficient to invalidate a contract is not controversial. Few would argue that a contract entered at gunpoint ought to be enforced and the law is clear that such agreements are not enforceable. What is less clear are the principle(s) that underlie such decisions and the proper scope or reach of those principles. These questions are important for both the theory and practice of contract law. Theoretically, because any adequate account of contract law—a doctrine that in the orthodox understanding holds out the ideal of freedom as a core value—must explain that part of the lawin which individual freedom is most directly at issue. Practically, because the recognition in English courts over the last twenty-five years that the defence of duress may be invoked in situations other than threats to a person or even threats to a person's goods (in short, the acceptance of “economic duress”), together with the recent near-elimination of the rule that a promise to perform an existing duty is not good consideration, has meant that courts are regularly required to consider how far the scope of duress should extend.

The relevance of public interests in private law is at the heart of some central divides in tort scholarship. This paper argues that public interests pervade private nuisance cases. The uncertain and contested nature of public interests, and the absence in both the case law and the scholarly literature of an abstract definition of what is to count as a public interest, do not prevent these matters from playing a significant role in tort. In these circumstances, it is important to reflect on how we might set about articulating the public interest. This paper argues that administrative decisions that are intended to serve the public interest can in some cases provide a defensible vision of public interest for the purposes of private law. An examination of the process by which regulatory decisions were reached can provide indicators to assist in identifying and evaluating the strength of claimed public interests.

This article considers prescription as a customary standard of legal validity which enables judges to identify certain customs as law even though the status of those customs as law cannot be ascribed to a law-making authority. Although claims as to customs having prescribed are often bound up with claims as to the quality (as opposed to the validity) of custom as law, prescribed custom is properly conceived to be a feature of the rule of recognition – a criterion by which a court can identify, and declare, a custom as already existing law as distinct from both custom without the force of law and custom turned into positive law.

The Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 allows third parties to sue for breach of contract even though they are not parties to the contract. The Act also allows third parties to take the benefit of other types of promise, notably the benefit of exclusion clauses. This article explains the common law background to this important legal development and the Law Commission’s preparation for this legislation (L.Com. No. 242). But the main discussion is devoted to the Act’s effects. In particular, the author examines in detail the test for ascribing to a third party a right under the 1999 Act and the rules determining when the third party’s rights cease to be revocable by the main contracting parties.

If a baby is born alive only to die some time afterwards from pre-natal injury, for what crime is the perpetrator liable? Coke considered that if the injury was caused after quickening by an attempted abortion or by a violent assault upon a pregnant woman, the answer to this question was murder, even if the defendant did not intend or foresee death or serious injury to a fully-born child. The purpose of this article is to evaluate Coke's rule together with the authority in support of it and to consider whether, if it still exists today, it ought to be incorporated in the proposed Criminal Code.

Hart and Honoré's book is a thorough and scholarly study of the concept of causation in Anglo-American law. Closely reasoned, with full reference to the literature and a considerable treatment of Continental theories, it represents a serious attempt to restate the law in tort, contract and crime in an intelligible way. In future, any serious student of the subject will have to take note of it. Unfortunately for the authors they have backed a loser in supporting Re Polemis and criticising the foreseeability test; and since much of their argument depends upon their opinion on this question, their book must now be accounted largely out of date, if the decision of the Judicial Committee in The Wagon Mound receives the acceptance that seems probable. In respect of the general theory of causation, however, the discussion retains its intellectual interest; and the chapters on contract and crime, though relatively short, are largely unaffected by The Wagon Mound.

The legal régime of the sea has been a persistently important theme of the law of nations from the beginning; but it has probably never been more dominant than it is at the present time, touching as it does so many of the most vital interests of nations, such as the supply of food and of energy; politically sensitive questions like defence and immigration; and some of the most pressing aspects of pollution and conservation problems. With this renewed importance of the law of the sea have come also new doubts about its content and meaning, and even about the underlying legal principles. Half a century ago, the law of the sea was relatively simple, certain and stable, at any rate in time of peace. The classical dispute between the closed sea and open sea doctrines seemed at last to have been finally resolved on the basis of a kind of dualism by which the coastal state was to have sovereignty over a belt of territorial waters, subject to the general right of innocent passage, and the high seas outside that maritime belt were to be res communis, not subject to acquisition by title of sovereignty, but subject to an international régime which was spelt out in terms of the so-called “freedoms” to be enjoyed by the flags of all nations, the most important being the freedom of navigation and the freedom of fishing.

Why not, we are asked, establish a permanent reconciliation between England and Ireland by the conversion of the United Kingdom into a federalised kingdom whereof England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and, for aught I know, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, Shall form separate states? This new constitutional idea of the inherent excellence of federalism is a new faith or delusion which deserves examination.

BARRY Beavis fought the law of contract and the law won. To the disappointment of motorists nationwide, he failed to show that an £85 shopping centre parking fine was an unenforceable penalty at common law (or under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999). Ironically, he lends his name notwithstanding to a leading case which confirmed the existence of the penalty doctrine (a joined commercial challenge also failed on the facts): ParkingEye Ltd. v Beavis; Cavendish Square Holding v El Makdessi [2015] UKSC 67; [2015] 3 W.L.R. 1373.

To entitle an article “the future of information technology law” may appear unduly adventurous to those who would argue that the subject has yet to establish a present. The purpose of this contribution is therefore to give some information about the current reach of the subject as well as the directions in which it is likely to grow.

In his ‘Common Law’ Mr. Justice Holmes expressed the view (see pp. 300, 301), that a contract is properly to be regarded as the taking of a risk creating a liability to pay damages in a certain event. ‘The only universal consequence of a legally binding promise is, that the law makes the promisor pay damages if the promised event does not come to pass.’ In the Pollock-Holmes'Letters the matter is frequently discussed, and there are various passages from which we can get his views in detail (see vol. i, pp. 21, 119, 177; vol. ii, pp. 55, 200, 234). His position seems to be that liability in Contract is completely analogous to that in Tort. If you commit a tort you are liable to pay damages. If you commit a contract you are liable to pay damages, unless something happens, i.e., performance, over which you may or may not have control (i, 177). It is a conditional liability to pay damages. There is, he holds, no reason to speak of ‘promise’ in the matter at all, in particular, the performance and the payment of damages are not to be thought of as alternative obligations (this in answer to an objection by Pollock).