Over two centuries ago, in the first reported case of its kind, Lord Hardwicke held the “committee-men” or directors of the Charitable Corporation guilty of “breaches of trust,” for which they had to account to the corporation. The concept of the director as a trustee persists through the cases and the textbooks to this day, but its origin is ill-explained and its modern relevance imperfectly understood. Why is the director called a trustee? Is it because he once was a trustee in the full technical sense? In what respects does the position of a director resemble, and in what respects does it differ from that of a trustee? How far has the law acknowledged these differences? Is the law, in so far as it is based on trust principles, adequate to ensure the proper discharge by directors of their responsibilities?

Defamation law has historically occupied a position of overwhelming dominance in the vindication of the traditional right to reputation. Nevertheless, liberalisation of this legal framework including through the Defamation Act 2013 has led to a concern that, when analysed from a fundamental rights perspective, “gaps” in the protection provided for natural persons may have emerged. In this new context, there has been a renewed focus on whether data protection may fill the potential lacunae. Data protection law contains a number of important limitations and exceptions and its jurisprudence has been both limited and sometimes confused. Nevertheless, this article argues that its broad purpose and complex structure ensure it will play a significantly augmented role in the future, especially in actions against website operators facilitating the dissemination of information posted by a third party, the publication of opinion, or where either injunctive relief or the correction of inaccurate information is sought (in particular in cases of continuing online disclosure).

The article examines the different roles played by private and public intergenerational support obligations in England and France, assesses their impact on elderly people and their carers and suggests possible ways in which the law might be used to alleviate some of the difficulties.

The conception of moral responsibility, as Williams describes it, focuses on the “voluntary”. The voluntary, as applied to action, is to be defined roughly as “A does X intentionally and in a normal state of mind“. We have, he argues, good reason to use this conception for certain purposes—in particular, to use it in the context of criminal punishment for the purpose of determining who justifiably may be punished. However, this reason is not to be found either within the conception of moral responsibility itself, or within an understanding of what punishment is or should do: that is, this conception does not guarantee or require its own application; nor do the familiar accounts of punishment (as, e.g., deterrence or retribution) require that punishments be imposed only for voluntary wrongdoings. Rather, Williams asserts, we should follow H.L.A. Hart in founding the argument for moral responsibility on the value of political freedom: if citizens “should be able to conduct their affairs so far as possible without the state's power being unpredictably directed against them”, then punishments “should be applied to [and only to] voluntary agents”.

The anticipatory reasonable adjustment duty, introduced by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and now found in the Equality Act 2010, has been hailed as an innovative and proactive tool for embedding disability equality in services and public functions. Despite important successes, the duty has had a surprisingly low profile in academic scholarship and has struggled to fulfil its practical potential. We seek to understand how this has happened, identifying a range of factors that may operate as blockages to the success of the duty. Whilst these factors are interrelated, we group them under three main headings – visibility, uncertainty and enforcement. We reflect critically on whether, and if so how, relevant blockages can be tackled to enable the duty to embed disability equality more effectively within services and public functions and whether new supplementary measures (particularly concerning accessibility) are also needed.

MWB Business Exchange Centres Ltd. v Rock Advertising Ltd. [2016] EWCA Civ 553 deals with a number of important issues concerning variation of contracts. Rock occupied as licensee premises managed by MWB. In August 2011, Rock decided to expand its business, and entered into a written agreement with MWB for larger premises for 12 months beginning 1 November 2011. The licence fee was agreed to be £3,500 per month for the first three months, and then £4,433.34 from 1 February 2012. Unfortunately, Rock's business was not as successful as hoped and, by late February 2012, it had incurred arrears of over £12,000. MWB gave notice purporting to terminate the agreement, but the parties then orally agreed to reschedule the licence fee payments due from February to October 2012: Rock would pay less than the originally agreed amount for the first few months, but after that would pay more, with the result that the arrears would be cleared by the end of the year. Pursuant to this agreement, Rock paid £3,500 to MWB, which was the first instalment due in accordance with the revised payment schedule. However, MWB subsequently changed its mind and sued for the arrears. MWB presented two arguments why Rock could not rely upon the oral variation. First, MWB pointed to an anti-oral variation clause in the written contract. Second, MWB relied upon Foakes v Beer (1884) 9 App. Cas. 605 for the proposition that the variation was not supported by consideration. Both arguments failed before a unanimous Court of Appeal (Arden, Kitchin and McCombe L.JJ.).

In a series of recent papers Professor Ronald Dworkin has presented a critique of the legal positivist's analysis of law as typified by the work of H. L. A. Hart. Dworkin argues that the “model of rules” provides an incomplete and inadequate characterisation of the nature of legal argument and judicial reasoning and, hence, of law, by virtue of its failure to recognise that judges are bound, in making decisions, not only by rules, but also by principles which have rather different logical properties.

Robert Feenstra has argued that, although the conception of the trust—so prominent in English law—is generally unknown in civilian legal systems, one of the major areas in which the trust is used in English law, the dedication of property for public or chari-table purposes, is amply covered in the civilian systems by the concept of the foundation. There are, he says, two foundation concepts, both of which have their origins in post-classical Roman law. As for classical Roman law, he concludes that “the classical Roman jurists did not pay much attention to these foundations,” and that any discussion in the important classical Digest texts is found within the confines of legacy and fideicommissum.

The First concept is that of the “real” or “proper” foundation. The “real” foundation is a legal person, and the main point is the existence of an aggregate of assests devoted to a paticular purpose and provided with an organisation of administrators to give effect to this purpose … The property which has been set aside belong neither to the administrators nor to the persons who benefit from the foundation: it belongs to the foundation itself, seen as an artificial, a juristic person.

There are strong indications, Feenstra suggests, of an historical beginning of this real foundation concept in later Roman law, both in the legal position of the Church after Constantine, where texts speak of property belonging to an ecclesia or a monasterium and in the existence of venerabiles domus, where the “houses” are identified as holding property.

‘Reprisals’ is a mediaeval term which is first met with in the thirteenth century. Lawyers, who wrote in Latin, knew it as repraesaliae or repressaliae an almost exact rendering of the French représailles and the Italian ripresaglie. They tried hard to identify the usages it represented with practices they knew in the civil law. Especially did they try to identify it with the Roman pigneratio. It was not till the early eighteenth century that the essential uniqueness of reprisals was categorically asserted by Bynkershoek in such forceful terms as “operam ludunt qui rem apud Romanos incognitam Latino vocabulo conantur exprimere.”

In Germany v. European Parliament and Council (Case C-376/98, judgment of 5 October 2000) the European Court of Justice held that Directive 98/43/EC on the approximation of the laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States relating to the advertising and sponsorship of tobacco products ([1998] O.J. L 213/9), the legality of which had been challenged in various earlier cases (e.g., Cases T-172/98 and T-175/98 to T-177/98 Salamander AG et al. v. European Parliament and Council; Case C-74/99 The Queen and Secretary of State for Health ex parte Imperial Tobacco Ltd. and Others), was invalid.