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.

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?

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.

A court may be confronted by a lack of temporal coincidence between actus reus and mens rea but nonetheless impose liability because on analysis the coincidence requirement is held to be satisfied in form or in substance. The situation may arise in two ways. There may, as in R. v. Miller,1 be initial blameless causal responsibility followed by a culpable failure to avert or mitigate the consequences of the initial conduct. Or, as in R. v. Le Brun,2 there may be conduct with the mens rea required for the offence charged, but to no relevant causal effect, followed by a non-culpable causing of the actus reus of the offence. It will be contended that in these two categories of case blameless causal agency is apt to play too prominent a role in the imposition of liability for what may be very serious offences.

Toby Milsom was the most original English legal historian of the twentieth century. This paper gives a preliminary assessment of the importance of his work. charting the ways in which it has changed our thinking about the subject.

In common law jurisdictions, there has been considerable academic and judicial discussion of the duties of company directors generally. In contrast, relatively little ink has been spent on the specific duty, if any, of a company director to disclose his own misconduct (in the civil realm) to the company, even less so on the nature and basis of such a duty. This is unsurprising given the very restrictive approach to disclosure obligations in English law. Thus, while a director may in loose terms be said to be under a “duty” to disclose interests that conflict with the company's, such disclosure only serves the purpose of relieving him from liability, and failure to do so per se has not been regarded as an independent source of liability.

The author focuses on the voluntary use by judge or counsel of foreign law and foreign legal ideas as a means of shaping national law when this is unclear, contradictory, or otherwise in need of reform, as distinct from the formal presentatin of foreign law through expert witnesses where such law has to be applied. The number of instances in which this kind of borrowing may happen must, of necessity, be limited. The problem is that foreign law is unlikely to come in a simple form, attractively packaged; and language is a major problem in judicial attempts to be inspired by a foreign idea if not to transplant the actual solution. This has led the author to advocate a more co-ordinated use of the different talents that judges, practitioners, and academics bring to the process of creating and interpreting law and to assist the process by provision, in the English language, of easily accessible accounts of relevant foreign material. The approach finds an excellent practical illustration in the judgment of the High Court in Greatorex v. Greatorex.

In Redwood Master Fund Ltd. v. TD Bank Europe Ltd. [2002] EWHC 2703(Ch), [2002] All E.R. (D) 141 (Chancery Division, Rimer J.) the court upheld a clause in a syndicated bank credit agreement empowering a majority to bind a dissentient minority even though the minority were placed in a worse position than the majority.

The effect in summary of the case law on creditor voting clauses—mainly in the context of bond issues—when combined with the case law on shareholder voting, voting on corporate schemes of arrangement and the like, is that the clauses are valid provided that (1) the decision was clearly within the terms of the power, (2) the majority were in good faith, i.e. not motivated solely by malice or vindictiveness, (3) there were no secret advantages to some creditors to procure their votes, e.g. bribes, and (4) most difficult of all, there was no unjust oppression of the minority so as to constitute a fraud on the minority, e.g. by a discriminatory decision denying the minority an advantage granted to the majority.

There is nothing indigenous about the Indian Contract Act of 1872 (hereinafter referred to as “the Act”), which is a comprehensive though not necessarily exhaustive code of the subject. According to the eighteenth-century charters, which established courts of justice for the three Presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, the law there applicable was the English common and statute law then in force, so far as it was appropriate to Indian circumstances. Elsewhere it was the practice to have recourse to justice, equity and good conscience. Appeal to these three precepts was also to be made in the Presidency towns themselves in case no specific rule existed. This was the state of the law of contract in 1866, as briefly described by the Indian Law Commissioners in their report. This commission, which prepared the first draft of the Act, had been appointed in England in 1864, with Lord Romilly M.R. as chairman. The other members were W. M. James q.c., the Chancery leader shortly to become James L.J., Sir Edward Ryan, formerly Chief Justice of Bengal, who at this time often sat as a member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Indian appeals, Robert Lowe, as Lord Sherbrooke then was, a politician, later Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary, J. M. Macleod, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and John Henderson, barrister. The commission sat in London, and produced a draft report in 1866. This had still not become law by 1870, largely because of the opposition of Sir Henry Maine, then Law Member of the Governor-General's Council, to the proposals as to specific performance.

Of all legal disciplines, constitutional law is the most affected by the European Communities and their law. It is true that the law of competition and restrictive trade practices (to take an example) has, to an important extent, been altered and is currently regulated by Community law. However, the new elements in the European law of restrictive practices are only indirectly related to the nature or structure of the Community and its law as such. They could (with the exception of the new possibilities of judicial review through the European Court of Justice) just as well have come from a traditional international treaty as from international law. For, when we think of the law of restrictive practices we mainly think of what the rules say and much less of how they are enacted—in other words the content of rules and much less their legal nature.

In the course of their stately opinion in the case of The Wagon Mound the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council declared that “their Lordships have not found it necessary to consider the so-called rule of ‘strict liability’ exemplified in Rylands v. Fletcher and the cases that have followed or distinguished it. Nothing that they have said is intended to reflect on that rule.” The best excuse for the present addition to the controversial literature that is accumulating round this case is that, the courts having yet to pronounce on remoteness in cases of strict liability, there seems to be still some room for speculation, especially with reference to policy. It is therefore hoped that the fall, as it were, of yet another leaf in the forest will at least do no harm.