Why is it that intention, or intent, one of the basic concepts of the criminal law, remains so unclear? Judges decline to define it, and they appear to adjust it from one case to another.

Part of the trouble is the disagreement on the subject of intention amoung jurists generally. The Philosophers who have lately arrived on the scene, hoping to help the lawyers to slove their legal problems, in fact give only limited assistance. Their philosophical interest stems from the fact that intention is an important ethical concept, but they do not relate their discussions to any particular ethical concept, but they do not relate their discussions to any particular ethical theory, and they do not sufficiently consider the specific requirements of the criminal law. Indeed, they mix up the ordinary meaning of the word “intention” with its desirable legal meaning. To be sure, the meaning of intention as a technical term of the law ought to be close to the literary and popular one, but there are sound reasons for saying that the two should not always be indentical.

The government's recent Green Paper “Trade Unions and Their Members” contains several radical proposals for the reform of labour law, among them the suggestion that no union member should be subject to penalties by his trade union for disobedience to the union's call to take strike action. This proposal is based partly on a philosophy of committed individualism—everyone has a right to decide to work whatever a trade union has to say about the taking of industrial action—and partly on the government's concern over the well-publicised sanctions which unions such as the N. U. M. and the N. U. J. have recently imposed on members who have rejected official calls to participate in industrial action. The suggestion is made at a time when the actual impact of strikes (measured in terms of working days lost) is at its lowest point for twenty years and at a stage when, as one commentator has observed, “[t]he trend in this area of law, as developed in the courts and by Parliament, is towards strengthening the position of the union member who refuses to participate in industrial action”. Given its conviction that the taking of industrial action should be a matter left to individual choice (para. 2.22), it is hardly surprising that the government appears to view sympathetically the possibility of extending to members disciplined by their union (by expulsion or some lesser sanction) the right of complaint to an industrial tribunal.

It is an essential aspect of the English legal tradition in public law that judicial review should be based upon procedural standards. Lord Brightman has recently insisted that judicial review involves simply an appraisal of the manner in which an administrative decision is made. However, judicial attitudes during the last three years indicate a changing philosophy which appears to admit of greater scope for substantive review. The principle which is referred to succinctly in modern law as Wednesbury unreasonableness has proved, in the hands of some contemporary judges, a uniquely effective instrument for the exercise of this extended jurisdiction. The central problem posed by recent developments relates to the danger of a “surrogate political process” which may erode the foundations of legislative supremacy and political responsibility. Unbridled judicial review, in accordance with some emerging approaches, has basic implications for the future of the relationship between the administration and the courts.

According to traditional wisdom, although the public and academic writers are entitled to criticise the judges—and, in recent times, have not hesitated to do so most strenuously—judges do not reply publicly to their critics. To engage in open debate is unbecoming of the dignity of the English bench. However, every rule has its exception and on one notable occasion no lesser personage than the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, incensed at criticism of one of his rulings, published a 24-page pamphlet replying to his censor, John Pitt Taylor. This unedifying episode illustrates how even the holder of highest office can make a spectacle of himself. If ever a judge again feels disposed to respond to public strictures, he might first do well to ponder the experience of Cockburn C.J.

In recent years courts in the common law world have been concerned with their protective jurisdiction in the area of medical treatment; for example, the rights and status of the unborn foetus, the withholding of treatment from handicapped children, sterilisation, the provision of contraception, and the availability of abortion in relation to healthy and handicapped children and young adults.

It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate that Lord Herschell's famous statement in Makin of the law relating to similar fact evidence was and is valueless, that it continues to exert a baneful influence both upon the cases and upon much of the academic commentary on them, and that it is overdue for commitment to the scrapheap. The essence of my argument is that English law does not, in truth, regard reasoning from disposition as illegitimate. Hence, there is no negative principle from which positive exceptions need to be carved out and no rational basis for applying different law according to whether or not the prosecution seeks to place reliance on the nature of the accused's disposition. An attempt will be made to explain why, even after Lords Wilberforce and Cross had, in identifying some or all of these truths in Boardman, made the crucial “intellectual breakthrough,” they have not been grasped by the rest of the judiciary.

In his first book, Taking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin opposed the view that law is a body of publicly ascertainable rules identifiable by some basic master test or rule of recognition. In place of that account he offered a rival vision. Law was portrayed as inherently controversial in content. Discovering the law on this or that subject is not, Dworkin argued, simply a matter of looking up the established rules: it is a matter of constructing a justificatory theory beneath which the established legal rules can be subsumed. In his latest book, Law's Empire, that account of the nature of law has been backed up by an analogous account of the nature of legal theory. A sound theory of law, we are told, is not one that unearths semantic rules governing the use of the word ‘law’. Disputes between rival legal theories do not hinge on the discovery of such deep semantic criteria, any more than disputes about the content of the law in hard cases hinge on the correct application of a rule of recognition. Disputes of both kinds are interpretive disputes: they concern the proper interpretation of legal practices.

This paper is concerned with the way in which the verb occidere was treated in the Lex Aquilia and with the explanation for this.

Professor Dieter Nörr appears to have offered the most recent explanation of the narrow scope given to the verb in the first chapter of the statute. He makes two points. First, he traces the distinction between direct killing (occidere) and indirectly causing death (mortis causam praestare or praebere) to early Greek law and speculates that this distinction was transmitted into Roman law through the Greek schools of rhetoric. Secondly, he suggests that the Lex Cornelia de sicarüs et veneficis included the phrase mortis causam praestare. If true, this second point would show how firmly the distinction had become established. The phrase would also have provided an obvious parallel for the jurists when engaged in interpreting the Lex Aquilia.

The vagueness and uncertainty of application of the principles used to determine child custody appeals continue to cause great problems for the legal practitioner who must advise a client aggrieved by a decision at first instance. Child custody is an area where the right of appeal is unrestricted, but appeal court judges have nonetheless shown a marked tendency towards self-restraint in the exercise of their appellate jurisdiction. Two principal reasons are commonly given for this: first, the trial court in a child custody dispute often has a special advantage not possessed by the appeal court, in that it has seen and heard the witnesses; secondly, and more generally, the determination of a child custody dispute involves an exercise of discretion on the part of the trial court, in which the paramount consideration is the welfare of the child. For these reasons, which are considered in detail in the following section, it is perceived to be necessary to allow trial courts a degree of latitude. However, although the necessity for appellate self-restraint is generally accepted, there has been and continues to be wide disagreement as to the form which that self-restraint should take. In addition, there are many reported cases in which an appeal court has acknowledged the need for self-restraint, only to succumb to the temptation to intervene on the facts before it. The result of the absence of a principled justification for intervention is that there is no rational basis upon which parties can assess the strengths of their respective positions.

To re-open problems of the past and to rake up arguments long since laid to rest may seem a singularly pointless exercise for a family lawyer of the late twentieth century. Yet the controversy which raged in the 1840s over the requirements for common law marriage was never satisfactorily resolved; and even today the question could still arise and an authoritative answer be required.

When “ratification” is raised as an issue in relation to directors' breaches of duty, the difficulty which is most commonly discussed is how to draw the line between ratifiable and non-ratifiable breaches.

What has received considerably less attention is the meaning of “ratification” itself. This is evidenced, not the least, by the variety of other names attributed to the process performed by the general meeting when it “ratifies” a breach of duty. This has variously been described as “adoption,” “confirmation,” “affirmation,” or mere “approval.” Ironically, it is clear that the concept has nothing to do with “ratification” as it is understood in the law of agency, though this is the name most widely used.