I feel honoured to be your guest here, and am pleased to have this opportunity to lecture on my academic passion—“The Formal Character of Law”. Law has several fundamental characteristics. My main thesis is that formality is one of these. I define a “formal” feature of law as one that is in some way independent of the substantive content of the law. For example, the definitiveness of a legal rule is a formal feature of the rule's configuration, and is independent of the substantive content of the rule. Formal configuration is one thing, and substantive content another. But as we will see, there are different ways in which a formal feature may be independent of substantive content, and there are still other, related, senses of formal.

Anti-discrimination complaints by religious employees have constructed seemingly intractable conflicts. The United Kingdom courts have resolved these disputes by diluting individual religious liberty, particularly when determining questions of disadvantage and proportionality under indirect discrimination. This article explores an alternative UK anti-discrimination claim route for religious employees, namely an employer duty of reasonable accommodation. A comparative analysis outlines the corresponding Canadian duty. This model is applied to UK employment cases featuring indirect religious discrimination, specifically those claims which formed the recent applications in Eweida and Others v UK. It is suggested that adoption of the Canadian model be considered: its nuanced approach to proportionality is particularly instructive. Whilst such a UK duty could prove controversial, it would cohere with both normative theory in law and religion and conceptual understanding of anti-discrimination law. Moreover, reasonable accommodation's individualised focus should be acclaimed; it need not compromise collective notions of religious liberty.

If Jurisprudence strikes the law student as a miry bog, the analysis of a legal right ought, at least, to provide a path through the marshland. The disparate rumours of such a path may have a greater tendency to lead him into the middle of the bog than bring him safely to the other side.

It is almost a matter of definition that law restricts the freedom of each individual to satisfy his wants and desires in any manner he wishes. The restrictive elements in law may be regarded as justifiable because and in so far as they are necessary to ensure the maximum freedom for each and every individual. Freedom from interference can only be preserved by restricting everyone's freedom to exercise power over others. Perhaps the most fundamental and universal restriction is that placed on the use of force by one individual against another. Widely as social and legal systems may vary in the extent to which they allow some forms of power (e.g., economic power, industrial power, the powers of persuasion) to be exercised, they unite in prohibiting the exercise of physical power by one citizen against another. Many natural inequalities may be allowed to run free, but all legal systems attempt to “equalise” human beings to the extent of preventing resort to force by those who are minded and able to use this method of satisfying their desires. A prohibition on the use of force may thus be regarded as one of the minimum conditions of social life. This, in turn, is bound up with recognition of the right to life and physical security as the most basic claim of every human being. The idea of physical security as one of the “natural rights” of mankind has a long history, and Blackstone followed this traditions when he held that the right to life and limb is an “absolute right” which “every man is entitled to enjoy whether out of society or in it.”

Many years after launching Leviathan and towards the end of his life Thomas Hobbes composed A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England in which he set out his final thoughts on fundamental matters of law, legislation and sovereignty. This work was published for the first time in 1681, two years after the author's death, and though it represents Hobbes's final thoughts on these questions it has received but slight study compared with his other works. Leviathan and other earlier works must, no doubt, take first place in interest for the political scientist. The Dialogue, on the other hand, is a work of a jurisprudential slant and is as deserving of the attention of lawyers as it has been largely neglected by them. To this neglect there is one important exception. Sir Matthew Hale rejoined in argument to Hobbes's thesis. His argument remained unpublished till modern times, and even the enormous modern literature on Hobbes's writings has generally preserved a silence upon Hale's Reflections. One modern author indeed remarks briefly that “Hale's short treatise is the most brilliant contemporary reply to Hobbes's theory of positive law,” but the remark is not developed. The prevalent opinion may be represented by Holdsworth's view, and this supposes that Hale failed to grasp Hobbes's idea of sovereignty and that Hale's criticism therefore missed its mark. It seems timely to re-examine the received opinion (if Holdsworth's may be so called) for more than one reason.

“… for it is impossible that one should be Judge and party, for the Judge is to determine between party and party, or between the Government and the party; and an Act of Parliament can do no wrong, though it may do several things that look pretty odd;”

City of London v. Wood, 12 Mod. 669, 687, per Holt C.J.

“And forasmuch as the legislature always have justice and truth before their eyes, and their false recitals (if there are any) are made upon false information, from thence it follows that they do not intend any one to be concluded by such recital grounded upon falsehood, for he that says to the contrary affirms that their interest is to oppress men wrongfully, which is indecent to be said of them, and he who insists that some shall be concluded by such falsehood, impugns the intent of the makers of the Act, and in that the Act itself, for the Act is nothing else but the intention of the makers of it.”

The Earl of Leicester v. Heydon (1570) 1 Plowden 384, 398.

This paper was prompted by the feeling that the differences between the systems under comparison are not as great as they are commonly believed to be and by the knowledge that lawyers in each of these countries tend to have a vague if not distorted picture of each other's laws. The way I have tried to approach my subject has been through the use of statistics so, before I say anything about the differences between the systems, real or apparent, let me make some cautionary remarks.

Legally, it is possible to say of a particular company that it is a party to a criminal conspiracy, that it has acted dishonestly or that its conduct in matters of safety is so deficient as to amount to manslaughter. The mechanism which has brought most serious crimes within the competence of companies to commit is, of course, the concept of corporate alter ego or, more precisely, the doctrine of identification. This concept takes the conduct and state of mind of certain high-ranking officials to be the conduct and state of mind of the company itself, so that it may commit directly crimes which are not attributable to a company merely on a basis of vicarious liability.

This article considers some of the challenges which lie ahead for the Court of Justice of the EU in the field of remedies against the EU institutions following the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty. It examines the evolving role of EU remedies and, in particular, recent decisions of the General Court applying the new standing rules in Article 263(4) TFEU.

It is fitting for a lecturer to pay his tribute to the man under whose auspices, so to speak, he lectures. That sometimes is a difficult matter, requiring the closing of an eye to many things, but in this case I am happily absolved from any such necessity, for there can be no doubt that Maitland was a man of genius. I hardly need say this in Cambridge, or in any other place where scholars come together, for his reputation has been long and securely established. It is now more than half a century since his death, and longer since his books were written, yet they are today more widely read than ever. The intensive researches of the last fifty years have made only the smallest alterations in the conclusions they reached. He himself was perhaps not quite as sure of them as we are. The most honest of men, he was always careful to reveal his doubts, and it is to a subject on which he had many doubts that I address myself today. I shall talk about the ownership and heritability of land in the twelfth century, in other words, about the emergence of the fee simple as an estate in land. I shall begin by setting before you Maitland's own account.

In 2007 the European Commission produced a Staff Working Paper seeking consultation on the development of auditors' liability in Europe. The present article represents the views of the Working Group on the subject set up by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg.

This paper addresses one aspect of the European Court of Justice’s troubled case-law on the direct effect of Community directives: the so-called “incidental effect” of unimplemented directives against private parties, and its uncomfortable relationship to the basic framework of legal principles so forcefully affirmed by the Court in Faccini Dori [1994] E.C.R. I-3325. It is argued that the judgments in question can perhaps best be understood as some form of “disguised” vertical direct effect, but that any such solution merely reinforces the unsatisfactory policy quandary which besets this area of Community law.

The Offences Against the Person Act 1861 is much disparaged by today's criminal lawyers. Its provisions have been described as “impenetrable” by the Court of Appeal. The House of Lords could not conceal its dissatisfaction with what is called “the irrational result of this piecemeal legislation”. Andrew Ashworth has written of the “antiquated and illogical structure” of an Act which the Law Commission regards as “unsatisfactory in very many respects”. Most recently Brooke J., launching the latest version of the Commission's reform package, lambasted the operation of the 1861 Act as “a disgrace”, and claimed that this hostile view is shared in every corner of the criminal justice system.

In the course of the recent revival of the study of Comparative Law, repeated attempts have been made to define the nature and province of this branch of the law. Some writers maintain that Comparative Law represents a method of study rather than a department of legal science. They point to the fact that the technique of comparing different legal systems can be employed in almost every branch of the law and that Comparative Law, unlike the branches of positive law, does not fulfil a definite function in the life of society. In particular, writers on jurisprudence and history such as J. Bryce, Holland and Professor Jenks are inclined to subscribe to this view. Among the jurists who have made a special study of Comparative Law, Professor Gutteridge and Professor Kaden are strongly in favour of this view. Professor Gutteridge says: ‘The comparative method lends itself to the study of any branch of legal learning.’ According to Professor Kaden, it is the province of Comparative Law to disclose the points of agreement and difference in the solution which is provided by several legal systems for the same legal problem. The learned writer denies, however, that it is the function of Comparative Law to found a system of legal abstractions on the results of factual comparison. On the other hand, a number of students of Comparative Law consider their subject as a special branch of the science of law. Professor Saleilles, Professor Lambert and Professor Rabel support this view.