Edward Christian has been treated unfairly by history. As the first Downing Professor of the Laws of England and the first lecturer on common law in Cambridge, Christian suffered the chronological misfortune of launching his academic career in the wake of Blackstone's extraordinary achievement. Until recent years Blackstone's brilliance has obscured the intellectual originality and historical significance of all his successors.1 Moreover, Christian's misfortune in following Blackstone was aggravated by a lack of professional success at the Bar and by a seemingly abrasive personality that won him a number of eloquent enemies whose ridicule and comical anecdotes have long outlived their target.

“yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible” (Milton)

The foreseeable consequences of spilling a large quantity of furnace oil from the ss. Wagon Mound into Sydney Harbour have been in dispute now in two separate appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The cases will go down to posterity as The Wagon Mound (No. 1) and The Wagon Mound (No. 2). What was certainly not foreseeable was the complex forensic tangle to which the decisions have led.

PRODUCT liability law has struggled to develop a test for identifying when products are defective under the Consumer Protection Act 1987 (“CPA”). In Wilkes v Depuy International Ltd. [2016] EWHC 3096 (QB), Hickinbottom J. offered the most prolonged reflection on product defect since A v National Blood Authority [2001] EWHC 446 (QB), and rejected much of the framework of NBA. However, Wilkes provides little guidance regarding when products should be identified as being defective, reinforcing the need for a more deeply grounded approach.

When the news came forth from Downing Street last November that a fourth child was to be born to the premier and his wife, joy spread throughout the land. Gloom and despondency, by contrast, reigned in the McFarlane household when it transpired that Mrs. McFarlane was pregnant yet again, for in order to ensure that there would be no fifth child the couple had come to a decision: rather than rely on the physics of the condom or the chemistry of the pill the husband, like 9,000 other Scotsmen every year, was to resort to the surgery of vasectomy. So he did, and the health authority reported that the operation had been successful, but vital nature had counteracted medical art … and Catherine was born. She was in perfect health. Mrs. McFarlane claimed £10,000 for the pain of pregnancy and childbirth and both parents claimed £100,000 for the cost of keeping Catherine. They thereby joined the long line of those who, relying on the Court of Appeal's judgment in Emeh v. Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster A.H.A. [1985] Q.B. 1012, sought to throw on to the medical profession the cost of bringing up the child they had engendered and conceived, healthy though it was and in the event welcome—except for the expense.

The determination of the true measure of damage in any individual case is seldom easy. It depends upon considerations of causation, and causation is primarily a matter for philosophic rather than legal inquiry. Hume was not prepared to adopt the ordinary conception of causation. ‘It were infinite for the law to judge the causes of causes and their impulsion one of another,’ said Bacon. In a modern case the same thought has been expressed in the words ‘Causation is not a chain but a net.’ Faced with metaphysical uncertainty the lawyer must find some base on which to build his structure, and he does it by following the course of the pragmatist and asking of any particular decision: Does it work ? If it does he has to fit it into a scheme which should be consistent with a number of other decisions which also work, but are not always governed by the strict rules of logic.

When a court seeks the meaning of a written contract, it meets a barrier on the outskirts of the document, a barrier imposed by the parol evidence rule. Traditionally, if a court wants to go beyond the barrier for a wider perspective of what the document might mean, it requires a permit on one or more of three grounds. The first is “technicality”: that, although the words appear clear, they have a technical meaning that is not apparent without seeking extrinsic evidence. The second is “ambiguity”: that the words are not clear and the ambiguity must be resolved from a wider perspective. The third is “absurdity”: that a literal reading is not just unreasonable but unworkable or absurd and that that reading must be avoided by taking once again a wider perspective. The perspective is one which takes in the purpose and background (also called the matrix) of the document.

The following notes are offered in the hope that they may be of some use to teachers and students who are using (as the writer has for some years used) Salmond's Jurisprudence as a text-book for the subject of the Nature and Classification of Rights. They do not pretend to be systematic, and they are meant to be supplementary to the excellent and informative notes of Mr. J. L. Parker to the ninth edition. The page references are to the ninth edition; the section references (§§) will serve for earlier editions as well.