Legal judgment, I argue, entails moral judgment; legal obligations, correctly identified, are genuine moral obligations. Dworkin's legal theory is instructive, but problematic: his account of integrity fails to provide a convincing reconciliation of practice and principle. We can, however, defend a superior account in which the moral ideals that we invoke to justify legal practice – affirming its legitimacy under certain conditions – retain their force throughout our judgments about its specific demands in particular cases. Common law reasoning exemplifies that approach, reflecting the interdependence of practice and principle. It is an internal, interpretative inquiry, drawing on the moral resources of our own tradition, treated as an influential guide to the requirements of justice. The law is constituted, accordingly, neither by its socially authoritative sources, whatever their merits, nor by the moral effects of our legal practice. It is rather the scheme of justice we construct in our continuing efforts to bring our practice closer to the ideals that inspire and redeem it.

THE Legal Services Board, tasked with the supervision of approved regulators of persons carrying on legal activities, granted an application (by the Bar Standards Board, Solicitors Regulation Authority, and ILEX Professional Standards Board) for approval of alterations to their regulatory arrangements to give effect to the so-called Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (“the decision”). The Scheme provides for judicial assessment of criminal advocates in England and Wales: only those deemed “competent” would gain full accreditation for upper levels of criminal work. Judicial review had been sought, unsuccessfully in the courts below, by barristers practising criminal law. The question in R. (on the application of Lumsdon and others) v Legal Services Board [2015] UKSC 41; [2015] 3 W.L.R. 121 was whether the decision was contrary to Regulation 14 of the Provision of Service Regulations 2009 (SI 2999/2009), which implemented Directive 2006/123/EC (O.J. No. L 376, p. 36). Regulation 14 requires that any authorisation scheme cannot be set unless, inter alia, the need for such a scheme is “justified by an overriding reason relating to the public interest” and the scheme's objective “cannot be attained by means of a less restrictive measure” (see Regulation 14(2)).

This article is the Sir David Williams Lecture delivered by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, in Cambridge in May 2001. In it the author considers the operation of the twin processes of devolution and federalism in the United Kingdom and contrasts it with their operation in the United States, where the different premises have produced different historical trajectories and different contemporary challenges. Yet federalism and devolution in the two countries also reflect many of the same values and thus present many of the same opportunities.

This article argues that it is important for the International Court of Justice to be given an opportunity, for instance through a request for an Advisory Opinion, to explain what exactly it meant when it suggested that the ordinarily applicable international law on immunities need not be an obstacle “before certain international criminal courts, where they have jurisdiction”. Two international criminal courts have built a structure of case law on this one obiter comment, which it seems unable to support.

THE ECtHR has for the second time in three years engaged with the British Government's handling of whole-life prison terms. In Hutchinson v United Kingdom (Application no. 57592/08), Judgment of 3 February 2015, not yet reported, the Fourth Section accepted the authoritativeness of an English court's decision on the meaning of English law relating to the Home Secretary's discretion to reduce a whole-life sentence. It also yielded to national judges on whether this sentence review mechanism complies with the proscription on inhuman and degrading treatment in Article 3 of the ECHR.

The devastating impact that psychiatric illness can have on people's lives is beyond dispute. It would be absurd to contend that such harm is somehow intrinsically less serious than physical injury; indeed, over many years, medical research has pointed to the artificiality of characterising it as lacking physical manifestations. Its destructive potential is brought into sharper focus as mental attributes become ever more integral to everyday functioning. Yet, to this day, neither popular nor judicial opinion is noticeably receptive to a cause of action based on proof of a “recognised psychiatric disorder”, which is still often trivialised by the label “nervous shock”. This negative attitude is most apparent when claimants are not, or are not regarded as, the direct victims of someone else's conduct. The very notion of compensating people whose suffering derives from their reaction to the injuring of others often evokes surprise, indignation and disdain.

Restitution has always been part of the common law. Yet in recent years a startling transformation has taken place: an active and determined group of scholars have collected together the hitherto scattered materials, insisting that this is the only way in which these materials can be understood; and have claimed that despite the apparent diversity they are all bound together by a single notion, that of “unjust enrichment”. A great deal of attention has been paid to elaborating this notion, and to defending particular conceptions of it.

THIS subject has been considered in Novoship (UK) Ltd. v Mikhayluk [2015] 2 W.L.R. 526; [2014] Q.B. 499. The first plaintiff (“Novoship”) and the 14 other plaintiff companies (“the Novoship Group”) were indirect subsidiaries of the JSC Novorossiyak Shipping Co., incorporated in Russia. The first defendant, Mr. Mikhayluk, was an officer of Novoship and in charge of negotiating the charter of vessels owned by members of the Novoship Group. In litigation in the Commercial Court, he was held to have been in breach of his fiduciary duty to members of the Novoship Group by his corrupt conduct between 2002 and 2004 in dealings with various charterers. These included the sixth defendant, Mr. Nikitin, and the eighth defendant, Henriot Finance Ltd. (“Henriot”), a Virgin Islands company owned and controlled by him. There were connections with a number of jurisdictions but the litigation was conducted on the footing that the governing law was that of the English forum.

In accepting the honour of writing an article for The Cambridge Law Journal, and in deciding to review some aspects of Canadian constitutional law, I realize that I must assume a good deal of knowledge on the part of my readers, otherwise it would be difficult to know where to begin, where to end, what to say, what to omit. For my immediate purposes it will be sufficient to point out that Canada is a federation of nine provinces created under the British North America Act, 1867, carrying on its executive, legislative, administrative and judicial activities in public and private law under that Act and its amendments and under the great landmarks of English constitutional law in so far as not modified or changed by validly enacted federal or provincial legislation. Legislative powers are divided between the federal and provincial legislatures in such a way as to exhaust the whole field, which is not fenced, as in the constitutional law of the United States, with any constitutional limitations. Granted the legislative power, the manner of its exercise cannot be questioned in the Courts by any arguments drawn from a Bill of Rights, or by the many refinements, moral, political or legal, which flow from ‘the privileges and immunities’ or ‘due process’ clauses of the American constitution. In Canada the doctrine of legislative supremacy prevails. Canadian legislative powers are distributed under the creating Act of 1867. To the provincial legislatures belong certain exclusive enumerated powers under section 92, while, under section 91, the undefined residue belongs to the parliament of the Dominion. For the moment detail is unnecessary. I purpose to view (a) the immediate historical evolution of these legislative powers in order to appreciate (b) the judicial process in relation to them. I shall not concern myself with the minutice of this process, fascinating as they are, but confine myself to certain aspects of it which have become fundamental. I shall conclude (c) with a short view of the treaty-making power, as already it is under further discussion in Canada in the hope of peace ahead. I have specially selected these points of view for a law journal, because federalism and federal law and the judicial process in relation to them are matters of perennial interest and are already in prominence in connexion with the proposed reconstructions of the world. In addition, the judicial process in relation to the British North America Act, 1867, provides an important chapter in the study of stautory interpretation—a subject of equal perennial interest. I refrain from adding anything of a comparative nature, for I have neither the space nor the qualifications to go beyond legal analysis and reach the economic and social life of other federations, without an expert knowledge of which comparative law is of little worth.

WHEN the ambit of the criminal law is narrowed judicially, what impact should this have on convictions previously secured under the disavowed, broader rules? This question was considered by the Court of Appeal in Johnson and Others [2016] EWCA Crim 1613, [2017] 1 Cr. App. R. 12.

This article challenges the commonly expressed view that shareholders wishing to bring a derivative action on behalf of the company must have “clean hands” ie that there must be nothing in the shareholders behaviourwhich renders it unjust to allow the derivative action to proceed. While minority shareholders’ misbehaviour might well have consequences for themselves, such as requiring the repayment of dividends known to have been paid unlawfully, those actions ought, in the normal course of events, to be irrelevant for the purpose of deciding whether to allow a derivative action to proceed. This article suggests some circumstances in which a minority shareholder’s situation or actions may affect the decision to allow a derivative action brought by that particular shareholder to proceed, but these do not spring from the clean hands doctrine, but rather from the particular factual circumstances of the case or from an entirely proper desire on the court’s part to use the derivative action only where it is necessary to achieve justice for the company

This article addresses the manner in which accounts of profits are quantified when they are ordered against fiduciaries. Unlike previous scholarship, which has often sought to explain recent case law by reference to preconceived conceptual models, the present article addresses the topic by drawing on the reasoning adopted in the cases over a longer period, with a view to helping with the practical resolution of future cases, while also offering arguments drawn from that analysis as to the correct approach to the conceptual questions that arise.

A Question which is increasingly asked is whether there is a right to be a parent. The recent decision of the House of Lords in Re B (Adoption: Natural Parent) [2002] 1 F.L.R. 196 may provoke some debate about whether there is a right not to be one.

This article considers the enforceability of arbitration clauses which are included in trust documentation. It focuses on two main questions. The first is whether internal trust disputes are capable of being settled by arbitration. The article offers arguments in favour of the arbitrability of such disputes. It then addresses the question of whether parties to an internal trust dispute can be forced to arbitrate, rather than litigate, where the trust documentation contains an arbitration clause. It is argued that there are real difficulties in the argument that such clauses can be enforced as arbitration agreements, under the ordinary arbitration statutes, but that the court could potentially enforce such a clause under its inherent jurisdiction to control its proceedings.