The recognition of ‘torts’ as a separate and distinct branch of th law is, as things legal go, extremely recent. The first English text-book on the subject (Addison) did not appear until 1860. Since that time, however, the subject of ‘Torts’ has probably received more attention from both legal writers and the Courts than any other subject in the law. This is understandable if one grasps the extremely wide scope of the field involved, and at the same time bears in mind the impact of modern science on the various activities in which men engage in present-day society.

It is now a cliché to highlight that whilst artificial intelligence (AI) provides many opportunities, it also presents myriad risks to established norms. Amongst the norms considered in the literature, the Rule of Law unsurprisingly features. But the analyses of the Rule of Law are narrow. AI has the capacity to augment as well as to undermine fidelity to the ideal of the Rule of Law. Rather than viewing AI only as a threat to important norms, this article’s core argument is that AI should also be presented as an opportunity to meet their demands. It uses the Rule of Law in tax administration to support this argument.

MISAPPREHENSIONS about the UK's constitution are ten-a-penny. Most prominent among them, perhaps, are the notions that the UK “has no constitution” and that fundamental rights cannot meaningfully exist without an “entrenched” or “written constitution”. To that list of misunderstandings can now be added the ideas – brought to light by the Supreme Court's judgment in R. (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51, [2017] 3 W.L.R. 409 – that the judicial system, far from being a non-negotiable feature of any constitutional democracy, is nothing more than a public service, and that access to it can be regulated by the executive accordingly. To describe UNISON as a welcome corrective to such misconceptions would be to engage in rash understatement. In a tour de force that ought to be compulsory reading for every Minister and parliamentarian, the Court elucidates the true value of independent courts and tribunals, illuminates the common law's potential as a guarantor of basic rights, and reiterates an axiomatic set of constitutional home truths.

When a defendant is charged with murder and wishes to rely on the defence of provocation, two conditions need to be satisfied. First, the provocation must have caused the defendant to lose his or her self-control suddenly and temporarily. This is the subjective condition. Secondly, the provocation must be such that the reasonable person might have reacted to it in the same way as the defendant. This is the objective condition. This condition is, however, qualified, since it is possible to imbue the reasonable person with relevant characteristics of the defendant, to see whether a reasonable person with such characteristics might have killed had he or she been provoked. Although this qualification of the objective test has been recognised for some time, it has become a matter of recent controversy as to when a particular characteristic of the defendant can be considered to be relevant and what the rationale of this qualification of the objective test actually is. Two distinct lines of authority can be identified. According to the first line, a characteristic can, generally, only be relevant if it affects the gravity of the provocation: Camplin [1978] A.C. 705 (H.L.). So, for example, if the provocation relates to the defendant's characteristic then it can be considered to be relevant, because the reasonable person would be more likely to have lost self-control if he or she had such a characteristic: Morhall [1996] A.C. 90 (H.L.), Luc Thiet Thuan [1997] A.C. 131 (P.C.). This line of authority does, however, recognise an exception to the general principle, namely that the reasonable person can be imbued with the defendant's age or gender, not because these characteristics affected the gravity of the provocation, but because they are characteristics which may affect the defendant's ability to exercise self-control: Camplin. But these are the only characteristics which can be taken into account for this reason. According to the second line of authority, however, any characteristic can be treated as relevant simply because it affects the defendant's ability to exercise self-control. This has been recognised in six recent decisions of the Court of Appeal, where the reasonable person was imbued with a wide variety of characteristics, such as battered woman syndrome (Thornton (No. 2) [1996] 1 W.L.R. 1174) and attention-seeking (Humphreys [1995] 4 All ER. 1008), simply because such characteristics affected the defendant's ability to exercise self-control.

There is a memorable line at the end of the film classic, Casablanca. It is spoken by the Prefect of Police, Captain Renaud, to his men just after Rick (Humphrey Bogart) has shot Colonel Strasser. He says: “Colonel Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.” That rule or principle of action—of rounding up the usual suspects—writ large, captures the essence of the South African security system. The system may fairly be described as an elaborate mechanism designed to empower the security authorities to round up, or otherwise dispose of or deal with, suspects of their choice. The technique of empowerment is the conferment of statutory discretion upon some official or body to limit, suspend or terminate the basic liberties of any citizen or group of citizens. This discretion is usually couched in subjective terms.

THE image of King Canute trying to hold back the tide is a popular one used to critique attempts by national courts to restrain the publication of private information in the face of a global and online media. The truth, or at least the allegation, will out. The issue is certainly not a new one. The futility of an injunction in England and Wales, given extensive publication out of the jurisdiction, played a key role in the Spycatcher litigation in the late 1980s. Such futility is a feature of confidentiality or secrecy: the tide of information cannot be held back in an information age. In PJS v News Group Newspapers [2016] UKSC 26, the Supreme Court, endorsing an approach developed by the High Court in several earlier authorities, distinguished between protecting confidentiality and preventing intrusion as twin rationales for the tort of misuse of private information. The intrusion of a pending media storm in the jurisdiction, repeating allegations already widely available, was a further misuse of private information and could usefully be restrained in England and Wales. Even where confidentiality had already been lost, privacy injunctions could continue to play a useful role as a defence against the significant additional intrusion, at least where it could be practicably restrained, and the pending media storm that would accompany a lifting of the injunction represented one such case.

Holbeck Hall Hotel stood on the cliffs at Scarborough with views over a lawn and rose garden to the North Sea. The undercliff below the hotel was owned by Scarborough Borough Council. Over the years, natural erosion of the coastline led to relatively minor landslips in the area. The Council engaged engineers to investigate them and remedial works were carried out in 1989, but in 1993 there was a massive landslip. The lawn and rose garden fell into the sea, and the ground under the seaward wing of the hotel collapsed so badly that the whole building had to be demolished. Its owner claimed damages from the Council, and Judge John Hicks Q.C., applying Leakey v. National Trust [1980] Q.B. 485, held the Council liable for breach of a “measured duty of care”. The Court of Appeal agreed that an occupier could be under such a duty to prevent danger to a neighbour’s land from lack of support due to natural causes, but held the Council not liable because it owed no duty in relation to latent defects which could only have been discovered by extensive geological investigation: Holbeck Hall Hotel Ltd. v. Scarborough Borough Council [2000] 2 W.L.R. 1396.

Whatever may be the correct analysis of a company director's status, it is generally accepted that his duties, whether fiduciary or common law, are owed to the company. The reasons why this is considered appropriate, and indeed commercially desirable, are manifold. From the conceptual point of view probably the most important is to do with the doctrine of corporate personality. Directors, as directors, owe their duties to their corporate principal and no one else. Of course logically the fact that one owes a duty to another does not prevent that duty being owed to a third party. The simple rule, that directors as directors owe their duties to the company, is reflected in a number of other rules, such as the so called rule in Foss v. Harbottle. In recent years the courts have been prepared to lift the corporate veil and disregard the fictional independent entity where justice so requires.