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.

The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which attracted so much controversy during its passage, continued to provoke dissent in the first case to reach the House of Lords on the interpretation of its public order provisions. The question in Director of Public Prosecutions v. Jones [1999] 2 W.L.R. 625 was the extent of the public's right to use the highway and, more specifically, whether a public assembly may constitute a lawful user.

The remedial aspects of judicial review illustrate in particularly vivid form the divergent nature of public and private law proceedings. The prerogative orders—mandamus, certiorari and prohibition—are available only via judicial review. Leave is required for judicial review but not for private law actions. By contrast with the private law writ procedure, judicial review must be brought promptly and within three months. In judicial review, a remedy can still be denied to the applicant who establishes a substantive case. As the Law Commission made clear in its Report Administrative Law: Judicial Review and Statutory Appeals, “[j]udicial review often involves values and policy interests, which must be balanced against and may transcend the individual interests, which are normally the subject of litigation between private citizens” (Law Com. No. 226, para. 2.1).

In 1988, Nicholas Mullen fled from England to Zimbabwe. Two months later, he was deported to the United Kingdom where he was charged with, and convicted of, conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property. He was sentenced to thirty years' imprisonment.

Ian Howell, driving a Mazda, attempted to overtake David Backshall who was driving a Ford Mondeo. This led to an “appalling example of road rage” involving a fight between the two drivers and the smashing by Howell of the Mondeo's windscreen. Backshall drove away and in his attempt to escape engaged in some unorthodox driving manoeuvres. The two men were charged with affray and two counts of dangerous driving. Backshall was convicted of driving without due care and attention contrary to Road Traffic Act 1988, s. 3, and appealed to the Court of Appeal: R. v. Backshall [1999] 1 Cr. App. R. 35.

When suit was brought against the police in the name of the Yorkshire Ripper's final victim, alleging that they were negligent in failing to catch him sooner, every single one of the nine judges who heard the claim decided that it should be struck out (Hill v. Chief Constable [1989] A.C. 53). The House of Lords gave two reasons: first, that no duty was owed to the victim because the police were in no special relationship either with her or (unlike the case where Borstal boys wrecked a yacht while on the run from their dozy warders) with the criminal; secondly, that it was contrary to public policy for any such claims to be brought against the police in respect of their handling of criminal investigations.

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.

Dyslexia is a specific difficulty in learning how to use written notation, not attributable to generally low intellectual performance, emotional difficulties, or external factors. While its existence as a condition in its own right had been suspected for over a century, it is only much more recently that relatively definite tests for its existence have been developed. Even now, no one test can conclusively show its presence or absence. Local education authorities must provide for the special educational needs of children under their care, though it is settled law that the authorities cannot themselves be sued for breach of those duties (X (Minors) v. Bedfordshire C.C. [1995] 2 A.C. 633). However, X contains strong dicta that where the plaintiff can demonstrate negligence by particular members of staff, such as educational psychologists, then those members of staff will be personally liable, and the authority will be vicariously liable. Phelps v. Hillingdon L.B.C. [1999] 1 W.L.R. 500 raises the question whether this is actually so. The Court of Appeal, reversing Garland J., have now held that there is no such liability. The court heard that even if (contrary to their view) the plaintiff in the case could establish professional negligence by an educational psychologist through failure to diagnose her dyslexia, and that this negligence caused her appreciable harm, none the less she had no cause of action.

Although opinion is divided on the significance of the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights (“the Convention”), most agree that the Human Rights Act 1998 is likely to have its greatest influence on the criminal justice process. The latest and best word on the implementation date of the principal sections of the Act is 2 October 2000, but its impact on the exercise of statutory discretion has already been felt as a result of the Divisional Court's decision in R. v. Director of Public Prosecutions, ex p. Kebilene [1999] 3 W.L.R. 175.

In the past five years, the conceptual ambiguities of Parliamentary privilege have come to haunt the courts with a vengeance. Ancient constitutional questions such as what constitutes a “proceeding” in Parliament and what counts as “questioning” a proceeding—encapsulated in colourful nineteenth-century cases like Stockdale v. Hansard (1839) 9 Ad.&E. 1, the Case of the Sheriff of Middlesex (1840) 11 Ad.&E. 273, and Bradlaugh v. Gossett (1884) 12 Q.B.D. 271—have been at the forefront of a clutch of recent decisions. In Prebble v. Television New Zealand [1995] 1 A.C. 321, the Privy Council gave new bite to Parliamentary privilege by ruling (in relation to the New Zealand Parliament) that it would be an abuse of both Article 9 of the 1689 Bill of Rights—which prohibits courts from questioning the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament—and of a broader principle of mutuality of respect between Parliament and the judiciary, to allow any party to litigation to “bring into question anything said or done in the House by suggesting (whether by direct evidence, cross-examination, inference or submission) that the actions or words were inspired by improper motives or were untrue or misleading” (above, at 337). As a result, domestic courts stayed two libel actions brought by Members of Parliament, on the basis that the claims and defences involved raised issues whose investigation would infringe Parliamentary privilege (see, e.g., Allason v. Haines, The Times, 25 July 1995). Parliament responded by enacting section 13 of the Defamation Act 1996, allowing individual MPs to waive Parliamentary privilege in order to bring defamation actions. But in an apparent reassertion of the spirit of Prebble, the Court of Appeal expressly approved—albeit outside the context of defamation—the Privy Council's wide definition of privilege as a matter of domestic law (R. v. Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, ex p. Fayed [1998] 1 W.L.R. 669, noted [1998] C.L.J. 6).

When a judge needs to construe a contract, to what extent can he or she have regard to factors which are external to the agreement rather than adopt a literal interpretation? This was the crucial question for the Court of Appeal to answer in Bromarin A.B. and others v. I.M.D. Investments Ltd. [1999] S.T.C. 301.

An unscrupulous woman battened on to a somewhat simple-minded, wealthy man, and cajoled him into parting with large amounts of his recently acquired wealth. The gifts that he made to her were, it seems, perfectly valid ones. It is astonishing then to find that she was, according to the Court of Appeal in Hinks [1998] Crim.L.R. 904, properly convicted of theft. How did this apparently absurd result come about?

In the days (not so long ago) when there were typewriters in solicitors' offices, there was much speculation whether the sale by a solicitor of a typewriter which was no longer required would be caught by the provisions in section 14 of the Sale of Goods Act that impose conditions as to quality and fitness upon a “business” seller. There was no real room for doubt so far as the original Act of 1893 was concerned, where the relevant subsections referred to goods “of a description which it is in the course of the seller's business to supply” (s. 14(1)) and to “a seller who deals in goods of that description” (s. 14(2)). Plainly, our solicitor was not within either subsection. But when section 14 was revised (and subsection (1) confusingly renumbered so that it became subsection (3)), these formulae were discarded and replaced by the wording: “Where the seller sells goods in the course of a business”—which is plainly wider. This reform was introduced by the Supply of Goods (Implied Terms) Act 1973 and later consolidated into the Sale of Goods Act 1979 that is currently in force. Remarkably, the scope of the new provision has not been the subject of any judicial consideration for over two decades; but the Court of Appeal has now given a firm ruling in Stevenson v. Rogers [1999] 1 All E.R. 613, with the consequence that any redundant typewriters disposed of by solicitors in the future will be deemed sold “in the course of a business”.

Mr. Naeem and Mr. Mohammad (“the plaintiffs”) were employed by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International SA (“B.C.C.I.”). They were made compulsorily redundant in 1990. In 1998, the plaintiffs, seeking to take advantage of the decision of the House of Lords in Malik v. B.C.C.I. [1997] 3 All E.R. 1, sued B.C.C.I. for “stigma damages”—damages designed to compensate the plaintiffs for the difficulties they had experienced in obtaining work because they were associated, in prospective employers' minds, with the dishonest way in which B.C.C.I. was run. However, there was a problem. Shortly after being made redundant, each of the plaintiffs had agreed to accept a sum equivalent to one month's gross pay “. . . in full and final settlement of all or any claims whether under statute, Common law, or in Equity of whatsoever nature that exist or may exist . . .”. Having entered into this agreement (“the B.C.C.I. settlement”), were the plaintiffs precluded from pursuing their claims against B.C.C.I. for stigma damages? In B.C.C.I. v. Ali [1999] 2 All E.R. 1005, Lightman J. said the answer was “yes”.

In The Wagon Mound (No. 1) [1961] A.C. 388, Viscount Simmonds expressed the hope that, by replacing directness (and its attendant “insoluble” problem, the search for breaks in the chain of causation) with reasonable foreseeability as the test for remoteness of damage in negligence, “the law will be simplified and . . . palpable injustice will be avoided”. Lawyers have long recognised that the first of these aspirations has failed dismally. Regrettably, the Court of Appeal decision in Jolley v. Sutton London Borough Council [1998] 1 W.L.R. 1546 provides a stark example of failure on both counts.

The collection of cheques can be a risky business. The collecting bank is exposed to the risk of liability if the person who delivers the cheque for collection has no title, or a defective title, to the instrument. A prime example is where the cheque has been stolen. The “true owner” of the cheque (usually the person who owned the cheque at the time of the theft) may claim damages from the bank for conversion of the piece of paper on which the cheque is written, when it is deemed to have a value equal to the amount for which the cheque is drawn; alternatively, he may claim recovery of the proceeds of the cheque received by the bank in an action for money had and received. In either case the collecting bank's liability is strict.

Defamation law protects reputation while affording a significant measure of protection to freedom of expression. Valuable expressive activity is protected by, inter alia, a number of defences, including qualified privilege. In order successfully to invoke this defence, defendants who honestly believe their—factually false—statements to be true must meet two requirements. First, they must establish “an interest or a duty, legal, social, or moral”, to communicate the relevant material to another (or others). Secondly, the recipient of the material must be shown to have “a corresponding interest or duty to receive it”. (See Adam v. Ward [1917] A.C. 309, p. 334, per Lord Atkinson.) The requirements of the qualified privilege defence have recently been glossed by the Court of Appeal in Reynolds v. Times Newspapers and Others [1998] 3 W.L.R. 862 (which is on appeal to the House of Lords). While the Court can be regarded as having extended the defence's scope, the position it has staked out is not, in all respects, clear. As a result the qualified privilege defence may fail to meet the requirements of the right to freedom of expression enunciated in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (E.C.H.R.). (When the Human Rights Act 1998 comes into force, the E.C.H.R. will be an element of domestic law.)

In Giumelli v. Giumelli (1999) 161 A.L.R. 473 (Gleeson C.J., McHugh, Gummow, Kirby and Callinan JJ.) the High Court of Australia substantially allowed the appeal from the decision of the Full Court of Western Australia, and by doing so confirmed the emergence of a new law of remedies.

It is often to the advantage of a defendant sued on an instrument that appears to be a bill of exchange to argue that it is not. The instrument will then generally not be negotiable and summary judgment will not be available under R.S.C. Order 14. Contractual defences will be able to be raised and counterclaims made. In short, instead of summary proceedings which the defendant would be denied leave to defend, the plaintiff will have to face the delay and expense of a full trial. Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp. Ltd. v. G D Trade Co. Ltd. [1998] C.L.C. 238 (C.A.) is an example of this. The defendant alleged that the instruments in question were not payable “at a fixed and determinable future time” as required by section 3(1) of the Bills of Exchange Act 1882 and so not bills.

Although the decision of the House of Lords in Kleinwort Benson Ltd. v. Lincoln C.C. [1998] 3 W.L.R. 1095 has done much to rationalise the law on restitution of mistaken payments, the law remains unclear in certain important respects. Two recent decisions have, however, sought to clarify the law.