This Article considers how trademark law should interpret the commitment in legislative history to the 1946 (US) Lanham Act that one of the principal purposes of trademark law is “to protect the public so that it may be confident that, in purchasing a product bearing a particular trademark which it favorably knows, it will get the product which it asks for and which it wants to get”. It looks back to highlight the often under-appreciated role of the consumer protection rationale in recent expansions in trademark protection, and then considers the different ways by which that basic objective might now be pursued by trademark law. It concludes that, without disregarding the core consumer protection purpose of trademark law, we need to start viewing the question of ensuring consumers get what they want both with a broader view of consumer interests and more explicit attention to a wider array of values.

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.

Cross-border contracts often contain a clause which purports to reflect the parties’ intention regarding how disputes arising from their agreement should be resolved. Some such contracts might feature a “jurisdiction clause”, thus signifying the parties’ wish to subject their disputes to litigation before the courts in a specific state. Others may include an “arbitration clause”, meaning that claims arising from the contract should be subjected to an arbitral hearing. More unusual are cases in which the parties have included a jurisdiction and an arbitration clause in the same cross-border contract. This article seeks to assess English law’s approach to determining the parties’ preferred mode of dispute resolution in these more difficult cases. As it seeks to demonstrate, the current practice in this area is not always easy to defend. The article advances an alternative basis for determining which of the two competing clauses should prevail.

This article engages in a comparative analysis of espionage law in the UK and Australia to determine whether the laws in each country are effective and appropriate. It finds that, while the espionage laws in both countries are largely capable of effectively addressing modern espionage, this has come at the expense of appropriateness – specifically, aspects of the laws in both jurisdictions are complex, uncertain and overly broad, and defences and other safeguards for legitimate conduct have limitations. The article argues that, while the effectiveness of espionage (and other national security) laws is an important consideration, this must be balanced with appropriateness to ensure that core rule of law values and legal principles are not undermined.

In the most important funding decision in 20 years, the UK Supreme Court has declared in R. (PACCAR Inc. and others) v Competition Appeal Tribunal and others [2023] UKSC 28, [2023] 1 W.L.R. 2594 that, as a matter of statutory interpretation, a third-party funder’s litigation funding agreement (LFA) is a damages-based agreement (DBA) because third-party funders are offering “claims management services”. This decision, which overturned both the earlier Divisional Court and the Competition Appeal Tribunal decisions, and long-held industry and judicial understanding, has had an immediate impact upon UK litigation. Many LFAs will require immediate re-negotiation, given their non-compliance with the DBA legislation; but for some, the ramifications are much more serious. This article traces the legislation, soft law and law reform activity which preceded this momentous event; it suggests that a key principle of statutory interpretation which governed the outcome might arguably be re-evaluated in future case law; it discusses the possibility of legislative reversal; and it predicts the ramifications of the PACCAR decision upon (especially consumer) litigation unless reversed.

Parents’ discrimination against their children is lawful. But the family, as an institution in which social goods are allocated, is as significant as the sites in which anti-discrimination law operates. At least prima facie, therefore, parents should be governed by legal prohibitions on discrimination. While state incursion into family life poses a threat to children’s autonomy, so does parental discrimination against children. Anti-discrimination law therefore needs new institutions to promote the values of non-discrimination in a part of society that currently sits outside anti-discrimination law’s reach. We identify existing regimes that may provide a starting point for this work.

This article examines what the state of the law regarding the tortious protection of the privacy of corporations tells us about the concept of a legal person. Given that non-human persons are capable of having an interest in at least their informational privacy, logic would seem to dictate that they should be recognised such a right protecting their personality. In reality, the law is most hesitant to concede the right to privacy to non-natural persons (the same being true of reputation). This suggests that, for the dominant strand of the law at least, despite the rhetoric, legal persons do not really have rights of personality; in other words, that they are not really persons.

This article considers three “unanswered questions” raised by R. (McConnell) v Registrar General for England and Wales (AIRE Centre Intervening) [2020] EWCA Civ. 559, which held that a trans man (with a Gender Recognition Certificate) who gave birth must be registered as “mother” on his child’s birth certificate. This article considers these questions to clearly situate McConnell within the context of the UK’s legal regimes concerning access to fertility treatment, gender recognition and legal parenthood in cases involving assisted reproduction. The article argues that clearly establishing the current legal position will provide the proper context to facilitate any subsequent legal reforms.

“Constitutional values” is a term which appears to relate to concepts of what is now called public law. By constitutional values, I mean the basic ideas and interests which structure relations between the individual and the state, and the obligations to which they give rise, which underlie the common law and to which it gives recognition in more or less articulated forms. These are ideas and interests such as liberty, private life, freedom of expression and access to justice. Constitutional values and human rights overlap, but they are not necessarily and always the same, either in content or in effect. In exploring this topic I hope to retrieve and bring to the surface an important aspect of the common law in terms of both private law and public law.

On the orthodox account of the private law compensatory principle, the claimant is compensated for the loss that they actually suffered because of the defendant’s wrong. Although the principle has various exceptions, it is widely accepted in both case law and academic commentary. We argue that it is nevertheless flawed, both doctrinally and theoretically. Claimants are never really compensated for their actual loss, and, contrary to popular belief, leading theoretical accounts of private law compensation (corrective justice and the continuity thesis) suggest that a principle of compensation for actual loss is not desirable in any event.

In this paper, I suggest that taking seriously the way in which the trust is founded on a duty of conscience has far-reaching ramifications for the appropriate attitude towards new forms of trusts that are designed to allow people to enjoy the benefits of ownership without incurring the duties that come with it. The morally freighted concept of conscience that lies at the heart of trust law means that every claim against trustees invokes a demand that the trustee abide by the requirements of their conscience. The conditions on the right to blame others for a moral wrongdoing, and the relationship between blaming and suing in the context of trust law, lead to the conclusion that, in novel forms of trust that are geared towards the creation of a morally bankrupt “orphan property”, beneficiaries do not have moral standing to sue the trustee for a breach of trust.