In its ordinary form, the warranty of land was an obligation, owed to the tenant of certain land, to defend him in his possession of that land against all men. This obligation to warrant was primarily, therefore, an obligation to come into Court, if called upon (‘vouched’) by the tenant, in order to defend some action brought against him for the possession of that land.

The reign of Richard I offers certain advantages to those who would A study the land law of that time. Glanvill's De Legibus shows the law as it stood immediately before the reign began; and, five years later, the earliest surviving rolls of the Curia Regis show the King's Justices applying it. These rolls have been printed and so are easily available. They carry the story from the summer of thé year 1194 to the end of the century and beyond. Unfortunately, however, they present certain difficulties. In those days, a plea of land before the King's Justices was ordinarily a lengthy matter, extended by essoins and adjournments over several terms or even years. And when one attempts to trace such a plea to its substantial hearing or to judgment one often fails. Perhaps the roll of the crucial term is missing, or the Justices have adjourned the case from Westminster into the Eyre—whereof few records survive. Perhaps the official scribe has so spelled or altered or contracted the names of the parties as to defy recognition; or the case may have ended prematurely by the death of a party or by some compromise not discoverable among the Feet of Fines. Meanwhile, moreover, one is conscious that these records of the law administered by the King's Justices tell us little or nothing of Shire Court and Court Baron, wherein much of the litigation still lay.

What use (if any) may be made of settled practice in statutory interpretation and what are the potential justifications for its use? Debate about the use of settled practice is often framed in terms of a tension between legal certainty, on the one hand, and legal correctness in giving effect to Parliament's will, on the other. That account presents a false choice. This article explores the use of settled practice and argues that it has a legitimate role to play in statutory interpretation and one that is consistent with the prevailing approach of the courts to statutory interpretation.

This paper explores the effect that conformity to the rule of law has on the ends which might legitimately be pursued within a legal system. The neat distinction between formal and substantive conceptions of the rule of law will be challenged: even apparently formal conceptions necessarily affect the content of law and necessarily entail the protection of certain fundamental rights. What remains of the formal/substantive dichotomy is, in fact, a distinction between conceptions of the rule of law which guarantee the substantive justice of each and every law and those which entail some commitment to basic requirements of justice while nevertheless leaving room for unjust laws. Ultimately, the only significant distinction between competing theories of the rule of law concerns the nature of the connection between legality and justice, not whether there is any such connection at all.

This paper defends a version of the doctrine that the mens rea of a criminal attempt should consist in intention as to the central or consequential aspects of the actus reus of the complete offence, even when such intention is not required for that complete offence, but need only involve recklessness as to the circumstantial aspects of the complete offence if such recklessness suffices for the complete offence. Attempted rape should require an intention to have sexual intercourse, but only recklessness as to the fact that the woman does not consent. Attempted criminal damage should require an intention to destroy or damage (though the complete offence requires no such intention), but only recklessness as to the fact that what is destroyed or damaged is“property belonging to another”.

In the criminal justice system’s scheme of unpleasant things, what official part is played by “naming and shaming” the offender?

TWO decisions of the Supreme Court – Benkharbouche v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [2017] UKSC 62, [2017] 3 W.L.R. 957, and Reyes v Al-Malki [2017] UKSC 61, [2017] 3 W.L.R. 923 – demonstrate the limitations of state and diplomatic immunity in employment disputes, and raise important questions concerning the interaction between immunity and other rules of international law.

In his Introduction to the Handbook of Palestine, which appeared last year, the High Commissioner, the Eight Hon. Sir Herbert Samuel, wrote: “If I were called upon to express in a single word the distinguishing characteristic of Palestine, I should say ‘diversity.’” What is true of the physical characteristics, the climate, the religions, the peoples, and the civilizations of that little country is equally true of its laws and its judicial systems.

The many critics of the inadequate protection afforded to consumers by the Hire-Purchase Act, 1938, as amended by the Hire-Purchase Act, 1954, have much to be grateful for in the Hire-Purchase Act, 1964, which received the Royal Assent on July 16, 1964, and became operative on January 1, 1965. Those who were cast down by the rejection, in the Final Report of the (Molony) Committee on Consumer Protection, of suggestions for more fundamental reforms which would replace hire-purchase by something less conceptually misleading, such as the chattel mortgage, may still hope; for it is believed that the deeper study promised before the change of Government in October 1964 still continues.

In recent discussion, gifts to the religious have been perceived as exercising a formative influence in the forging of some norms and customs of feudal tenure during the twelfth century. On the one hand, it has been suggested that gifts to the church assisted the clarification in the mind of lay feudal society of the concept of heritability—that is, the future enjoyment of inheritance—since donors could not alienate in perpetuity that which was not already heritable. This suggestion is extremely important in view of the different perceptions of political and legal historians concerning the development of heritability of tenures and tenant right during the twelfth century, which are seen variously to have existed as social or legal norms from varying times and from different causes. A related argument runs that, whilst the warranty clause in charters (but not warranty per se) was initially conceived within the framework of the personal relationship between lord and man, its more widespread diffusion in charters was stimulated largely through the auspices of these religious beneficiaries of gifts in frankalmoign. The introduction of warranty into charters at the instance of religious beneficiaries is thus related to their concern to secure their own perpetual rights in the land at a time of a nascent realisation of hereditary tenant right, and the religious were thus foremost in the insertion of warranty clauses in charters which they, as beneficiaries, wrote or influenced, to secure their own unbridled tenure in perpetuity.

The standing of natural and legal persons to bring annulment proceedings is one of the most difficult and controversial issues in EC law. Article 173(4) EC states that non-addressees of a Community decision can only challenge it if they are directly and individually concerned by it. In Plaumann v. Commission (Case 25/62 [1963] E.C.R. 95) the Court explained that a decision is of individual concern to non-addressees if it “affects them by reason of certain attributes which are peculiar to them or by reason of circumstances in which they are differentiated from all other persons, and by virtue of these factors distinguishes them individually just as in the case of the person addressed”. But what degree of factual or legal differentiation must an applicant show to be individually concerned? The standard test is that the applicants need to belong to a “closed category”, namely one the membership of which had become fixed and ascertainable when the measure in question was adopted. The mere capacity of an applicant as a trader, importer or exporter does not suffice to render him individually concerned (Case 38/64 Getreide-Import Gesellschaft v. Commission [1965] E.C.R. 203; Case 191/89 Co-Frutta v. Commission [1989] E.C.R 793).

Although very different in many respects, the EU and Canada nevertheless confront common problems in certain areas. One such common problem is how to manage inter-state regulatory diversity within a federal (or federal-like), multinational system. This paper compares the different ways in which the EU and Canada have chosen to address the problem of national barriers to trade within their internal markets, and the consequences of these choices. It is somewhat counterintuitive for EU lawyers that a full-fledged state may have an internal market that is less integrated than that of the EU; and yet that is the case in Canada. The comparison is illuminating as to the different possible approaches of federal polities to the problem of state regulatory choices and barriers to trade, the paramount importance of institutional choice, and the significance of historical and political circumstances.