Two years ago I was invited to join a conference of law students from the Nordic countries and to discuss with them the law of labour relations. There were many radical socialists among the members of the conference. One after another young angry men attacked the present state of law in the Nordic countries as the law of the ruling classes. The collective agreement was not, as I had been used to see it, a bargain between two independent parties but a means of oppression. Not seldom the officers of the national union were in collusion with management and the rest of the establishment. In the debate I answered that their views were too narrow because there were at least the following four elements of law: (1) the law of survival, (2) the law of toleration, (3) the laws of the ruling classes, and (4) laws based upon agreements. Their laws represented only one of these four elements. Today I am going to try to develop this general theme.

The title of this article is not felicitous, but the author has not been able to think of one which would be palpably less infelicitous.

The word “transnational” is used simply to indicate that the article is not concerned with inter-state or inter-Provincial situations of the sort liable to arise in federal or composite constitutional structures.

The Report of the Committee on Ministers' Powers has now been available for more than a year, and the Committee's recommendations as to how far steps should be taken to secure the sovereignty of Parliament and the supremacy of law in the sphere of delegated legislation and judicial or quasijudicial powers exercised by Ministers of the Crown are well known. The Report has been reviewed and criticized by (inter alios) Dr. W. A. Robson, one of the principal witnesses before the Committee, and Mr. W. I. Jennings. Both of these writers are teachers of law, and their observations should be carefully studied.

The boundary between the fields of mistake and impossibility in contract seems never yet to have been critically surveyed. But such a survey is badly needed, for it is plain that at the moment the law of mistake is in no less a state of confusion than is the law of impossibility or ‘frustration’. The outstanding case of recent years, Bell v. Lever Bros., Ltd. (1931), met with such universal and (if it may humbly be said) unmerited hostility from publicists in all quarters that this alone calls for an inquiry into the difficulties of the subject. There, has been a disturbing tendency among text-writers, led by Pollock, to profess an inability to understand the ratio deddendi of the case, to try to limit it for the future to its exact facts, and to refuse to recognize in it any legal principle.

Senator Pinochet, former President of Chile, when undergoing medical treatment in London, was arrested on warrants issued by Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrates. The authorities of Spain had sought his extradition to Spain to stand trial, principally, for his allegedly having authorised, when President of Chile, the torture in Chile of many persons, including Spanish citizens. Pinochet challenged the warrants by way of judicial review proceedings; the Divisional Court quashed them by certiorari on the ground that, as former head of State, he was immune from the jurisdiction of the English courts. The House of Lords allowed an appeal in part by a bare majority (Lords Nicholls and Steyn with whom Lord Hoffmann concurred, Lords Slynn and Lloyd dissenting: R. v. Bow Street Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate, ex p. Pinochet [1998] 2 W.L.R. 825, henceforth Pinochet (1)). That ruling was set aside “on the ground that the Committee was not properly constituted” (ex p. Pinochet (No. 2) [1999] 1 All E.R. 577); a rehearing of the appeal took place before a differently constituted Judicial Committee (ex p. Pinochet (No. 3) [1999] 2 W.L.R. 827). It, by a large majority (Lords Browne-Wilkinson, Hope, Hutton, Saville, Millett and Phillips, Lord Goff dissenting), also allowed the appeal in part.

In a revolutionary but unsatisfactory recent decision, the High Court of Australia has allowed a third-party beneficiary of an insurance contract a right to sue the promisor. The decision casts doubt upon the whole doctrine of privity and ultimately upon bargain as the theoretical basis of promissory liability. The Trident case is unsatisfactory not because it allowed a third-party beneficiary a cause of action or because it challenges privity and bargain, but because it offers no satisfactory replacement for the theory of bargain. The reasons the court gave for recognising a right to sue are weak and inconsistent with the common law's approach to questions of civil liability. That approach is to give a plaintiff a cause of action against a defendant not solely because of something the defendant has done, but because there is a legally relevant link between what he has done and the plaintiff's condition. That is, the plaintiff must, in order to establish a right, satisfy some criterion for linking the defendant's behaviour to his complaint.

All who belong to the small class of persons interested in medieval legal procedure will wish to express their thanks for, and admiration of, the latest contribution made to our knowledge of the subject by the distinguished literary partnership of Mr. H. G. Richardson and Dr. G. O. Sayles. It appears in Volume 60 of the Selden Society publications (dated 1941, but issued last year) entitled, ‘Select Cases of Procedure without Writ under Henry III.’ It is, we are told, an instalment prefatory to another volume which will carry the story beyond the year 1272.

By mid-1973 the Watergate scandal was reaching towards the highest levels of the United States' Administration. Elliot Richardson was nominated as Attorney General with a particular mandate to sort out the affair. The Senate Judiciary Committee, in its hearings on Richardson's nomination, was vitally concerned to ensure that the Office of Watergate Special Prosecutor should have maximum effectiveness and independence. The formula eventually agreed upon was promulgated by the Attorney General as a regulation under powers vested in him by Statute to prescribe regulations for the Justice Department. On the question of independence, it provided:

… The Special Prosecutor will carry out these responsibilities with the full support of the Department of Justice, until such time as, in his judgment, he has completed them or until a date mutually agreed upon between the Attorney General and himself. … The Special Prosecutor will not be removed from his duties except for extraordinary improprieties on his part.