The proposition that a master, who has become liable for an injury caused by a servant acting in the course of his employment, can recover an indemnity from the servant is one which has been stated on a number of occasions, but until the recent case of Romford Ice & Cold Storage Co. v. Lister no clear authority could be cited in support. It is true that the master's rights against his servant have been canvassed in at least three modern cases, but in all of them the common law position has been obscured by the application of the Law Reform (Married Women and Tortfeasors) Act, 1935. In Romford Ice & Cold Storage Co. v. Lister, however, by what those interested in legal principle can only regard as a happy chance, it was necessary for the Court of Appeal to deal with the matter independently of the Act.

Injunctions against pickets and demonstrators are not common. There appear to be no reported cases in England between 1899 (when Llandudno Urban District Council tried to stop a clergyman from preaching on the beach) and the disputes in the London Docks in 1972. In Hubbard v. Pitt, the use of injunctions again came to the fore, when a firm of estate agents obtained interlocutory injunctions restraining members of a tenants' campaign from picketing their premises as a political protest.

It has long been established that covenants in legal leases are enforceable where there is privity of contract or privity of estate. Privity of contract exists where the litigants are the original parties to the lease and where the benefit of the covenant has been assigned. Privity of estate applies where the parties are in the relationship of landlord and tenant. Thus an assignee of the landlord's freehold reversion and an assignee (but not sub-lessee) of the lease are in privity of estate. The traditional view is that privity of estate requires a legal lease. This limits the running of covenants in equitable leases (there will be an equitable lease if the necessity for a deed has been overlooked or if there is merely an agreement for a lease). The principle that an equitable lease does not give rise to privity of estate has several important exceptions. Before these are considered, however, it is expedient to examine the general principle.

In recent years the principle has come under attack. The source of the attack emanates from the celebrated dicta of Jessel M.R. in Walsh v. Lonsdale, describing the effect of the Judicature Act 1873:

There are not two estate as there were formerly, one estate at common law by reason of the payment of the rent from year to year, and an estate in equity under the agreement. There is only one Court, and the equity rules prevail in it. The tenant holds under an agreement for a lease.

For at least a century and a quarter one of the most settled and invariable maxims of the criminal law, founded upon a decision of 15 judges in the Court for Crown Cases Reserved (Prince (1875) 2 C.C.R. 154; see, also, Robins (1844) 1 C. & K. 456), has been that the prosecution did not have to prove fault on the defendant’s part in respect of the element of age in statutory offences created for the protection of the young. Many statutes have been drafted (or amended), and thousands upon thousands of defendants have been convicted, on this basis. But no longer. For the Appellate Committee has decreed, without giving any reasons for doing so-there is just a bare assertion (B. v. D.P.P. [2000] A.C. 428, reversing a unanimous decision of a strong Divisional Court: [1998] 4 All E.R. 265)—that “an age-related ingredient of a statutory offence stands on no different footing from any other ingredient”, and that proof of fault (in the shape of the absence of a belief-reasonable or unreasonable—that the child is above the proscribed age) is required unless excluded by Parliament either expressly or by “necessary implication, … [that is, by] an implication which is compellingly clear” (Lord Nicholls). “Such an implication”, we are told, “may be found in the language used, the nature of the offence, the mischief sought to be prevented, and any other circumstances which may assist in determining what intention is to be attributed to Parliament when creating the offence” (ibid.). This is, of course, none other than the all too depressingly familiar litany of vague, overlapping criteria which from time out of mind has signally failed to compel from the judges predictable answers to the question whether, when Parliament has been silent on the point, a person must, if she is to be convicted of a given offence, be presumed to have been at fault in respect of all, or some, of its external elements. The reference to a silent legislature’s intention is to a fiction—a mere rhetorical device. There is, as everyone knows, only one sure and compelling guide: the express provision of a no-fault defence logically precludes a requirement to prove fault in regard to the matter to which it refers.

In Great Peace Shipping Ltd. v. Tsavliris Salvage (International) Ltd. [2002] 3 W.L.R. 1617 the Court of Appeal considered the circumstances in which a contract, entered into as a result of a mistaken assumption shared by the parties, would be invalidated. In that case, the defendant, a salvage operator, agreed to provide its services to the owners of The Cape Providence, which had suffered severe structural damage. Unfortunately, the only tug that the defendant could find to perform these services was six days away from the vessel. This gave rise to concerns over crew safety if the vessel sank whilst awaiting the tug. The defendant’s brokers, therefore, sought to hire a vessel which was sufficiently close to be able to evacuate the crew if necessary. The brokers were informed by a well-respected information agency that The Great Peace, a vessel owned by the claimant, was “in close proximity” to the stricken vessel, approximately 35 miles away. As a result, the defendant’s brokers negotiated with the claimant for the hire of The Great Peace for a period of five days, both parties assuming that the information as to The Great Peace’s location was correct. On discovering that the vessels were in fact some 410 miles apart, the defendant hired an alternative vessel and sought to cancel the contract with the claimant. Proceedings were commenced to recover the full amount of the hire, or alternatively damages for breach of contract. The defendant resisted the claim on the ground that the contract was either void at common law or voidable in equity, as both parties had laboured under a fundamental mistake at the time of contracting. Both arguments were rejected by Toulson J., at first instance, and by Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers M.R. delivering the judgment of the Court of Appeal.